


Headlines

by Cards_Slash



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Romance, Southern Belles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:09:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 41,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7769641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bones is the headline news story of the Enterprise gossip rag six out of seven days in a standard Earth week.  He doesn't even have to try--in between developing a reputation of being 'surly' and the obvious sexual tension he has with Spock, the gossipmongers just can't help themselves.  It should have stopped when the ship got destroyed and thirty nine percent of the crew died.  But there he is, on the front page, pining after Spock while having casual sex with Jim.  (While one of those is true, the other most definitely isn't.  Probably.  He was pretty sure.)</p>
<p>(Beyond spoilers if still relevant.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So yes there is strong Bones/Kirk in this. The end game involves Spock. We all need more Bones/Spock.

Bones woke up alone in Jim’s bed; abruptly shaken awake by the most annoying alarm on the entire fucking ship. (Not that Bones had made a full tour of all the quarters on the ship but he’d been in enough of them to feel fairly confident to know.) There was no slapping the sound away either, it didn’t respond to voice or touch but nagged a man until he got off the bed. Bones spent at least sixteen seconds of the morning weighing whether or not it was worth the effort to roll out of bed and sleep on the floor. 

The noise of it—irregular in pitch and volume was the sort of thing that generations prior must have used as a torture device. It drove him out of bed until he was feet-against-the-floor on the side, leaning forward with his fingers working through the deep-sleep tangles in his hair. 

“Good morning to you too,” he mumbled to the alarm and the cold space where Jim had been the night before. Maybe to the emptiness of the room in general—forlornly without character without James T Kirk taking up space inside of it. Bones rubbed his temple with his thumb and willed himself to think sweetly calming thoughts while he walked to the bathroom, but by the time he was grimacing at his reflection in the mirror he was making private bets about what the gossip rag’s headline was going to be.

“Chief medical officer coerced into having sex with captain, wakes up alone _again_ : to the surprise of nobody.” He mumbled at the mirror before rolling his eyes (again).

\--

Jim was not at breakfast but Chapel was there sipping coffee and nibbling on replicated pastries and a selection of ‘galaxy fruits’. She offered him a seat with a swish of her hand and cleared her throat at his cup of coffee and lack of anything resembling nutrition. 

“Shut up,” he muttered at her.

Chapel had a sweet smile (when she wanted to) and a nurse’s demeanor. She set the thin PADD she was reading down on the table top and shifted her body so she was leaning more toward him. He looked at her out of the corner of her eye and she put her chin in her hand and battered her lashes at him. “Now, weren’t you the one that said you were going to _stop_ having sex with the Captain?” 

“I also said I was going to start eating breakfast.” He looked pointedly at his cup of coffee.

“Well there’s something to be said for _thinking_ about self-improvement. I just don’t see what it is you see in James T Kirk that’s worth going back every time. And don’t,” she said like a knife’s quiet hiss, leaning close to him with her eyes wide open her and finger pointed at his opening mouth, “tell me about his penis again. I have had sex with him and it was not so unique or amazing that it outweighed his character faults.”

“Maybe I find him charming,” Bones countered.

Chapel rolled her eyes and picked up her PADD again. “Nothing is more charming than waking up alone.”

There was no arguing with her about the worthwhile aspects of Jim’s character. Objectively (or subjectively as nobody that had ever had sex with Jim could be truly objective about him afterward) there was not a great lot of weight on the positive part of the scale. Rather than bother with it, he just leaned back in his seat, “anything worthwhile in the papers?”

“Just that you’re still the biggest slut on the Enterprise,” she said without looking up. “Might want to stop arguing with Spock; they just published a poll asking if the two of you should have sex.”

Bones rolled his eyes. “Aren’t there any adults on this damn ship?” He didn’t bother to wait for the answer but got up to refill his cup and went to relieve the night shift that worked the sickbay when he was sleeping.

\--

A man ought to have self-respect and Bones liked to tell himself that despite his other deficits, he had self-respect. And as such, he never went looking for Jim after he’d been left alone to wake up in an empty bed. He rarely had to, since Jim always found his way back to him. 

Like now, back from an away mission with a(nother) ripped shirt and mild abrasions. Jim was frowning at everything while Bones checked him over for any sign of serious injury. The two of them occupying the space around a biobed with steely silence. Jim broke first, “I couldn’t sleep.”

Bones glanced up at him and gave a half-thought to stabbing him in the neck with a semi-necessary hypospray to congratulate the man on that lackluster excuse. But it was less than three days to Jim’s birthday and three years since they got stuck out in the unholy black vacuum of space. It was sixteen away missions with less than spectacular results and no reason to think that Jim was immune to the general feeling of restlessness that was overtaking the crew. Bones was a marginally trained (but terribly qualified) psychiatrist when he had to be but there was simply no fix for the longing for familiarity and _home_ that had overtaken the crew. “That’s the best you’ve got?” 

“It’s the truth,” Jim countered. He kicked his feet while Bones cleaned his wounds. They were silent for a moment and strained though it was, the silence was nice enough way to pass the time. So there was no reason at all for Jim to open up his mouth and say: “so you want to have sex with Spock, huh?”

“I thought you said you were going to find a way to stop the gossip rag.”

“Spock said it was a harmless execution of people’s right to freedom of speech. He also said it was fascinating that so many well-educated and well trained individuals could be capable of such a low maturity level. I think all that means is that he does read it.” Jim was smiling at him then, “so how do you think he feels about you having the hots for him?”

“I don’t know Jim. I’m a doctor, not a mind reader.” He finished dressing the minor wounds on Jim’s shoulder and motioned him toward the exit. “Why don’t you ask him and let me know?”

Jim hopped off the biobed and picked up the ragged remains of his shirt. “What do you think,” he started with his speculation voice and his narrow eyes, “ _Uhura_ thinks about it?”

“Get out,” Bones said. “Now. Go pretend to be a Captain.”

\--

Regardless of being the number one star of the Enterprise gossip rag, Bones might have been the only person on the whole damn ship that didn’t actually read it. The greater part of the bridge crew was aware that attempting to communicate with him about the inane stupidity found therein was a waste of time but _Scotty_ seemed to take personal delight in needling him. So he was making some attempt to eat a worthwhile dinner when he was abruptly interrupted by the Enterprise’s third most intelligent crew member dropping a full plate of sandwiches on the table next to him. 

“So—” Scotty started.

“Keenser still sneezing corrosive green mucous?” Bones cut in before anything else could be said. “Damned if I know what to give him to make it stop.”

“Aye,” Scotty nodded agreeably. “So, how’s the Captain feel about your longing for a certain science officer?” He waggled his eyebrows like the suggestion wasn’t the stupidest thing he had ever said. (It wasn’t, unfortunately, the stupidest thing he had ever said.) 

Bones concentrated on scooping up a healthy spoonful of mashed potatoes and gravy (nothing at all like his Mama used to make despite how the man who programmed the replicator liked to say) rather than look at Scotty’s face. He had been listening to a soundtrack of whispers stuck on repeat the entire day. Any patience he might have had for it was long-gone. “Oh, they’re planning to have an old fashion fight to the death over my hand,” he said. “I don’t like to take sides, but if Spock wins, I’ll have to be his _second_ wife and I’d much rather be the first.” 

Scotty laughed. “Aye,” he said again, “I can see that about you. I wouldn’t try to get between Uhura and Spock, that’s not a spot you’re likely to survive. Although at least you’ll never be lonely.” 

“Jim’s not lonely,” Bones protested.

Scotty snorted, “I’ve never seen him a day he wasn’t.” Then he waved his hand in the air, brushing away the comment and an untold number of observations behind it. Instead he said, “so what are you going to do on Yorktown? I’ve been dying to set foot on it ever since I read about it in the science journals. It’s a modern marvel!”

“It’s a snow globe in space,” Bones retorted. “We’ll all be lucky if we don’t’ get sucked out when something breaks the glass.” His lack of enthusiasm didn’t stop Scotty from explaining every technical aspect of the space station he could remember. 

\--

Bones hated space but he liked the quiet of the observation desk. There were no nosy types with two-faced questions and big ears listening to find out what they could misinterpret on the observation desk. There was only him (usually) and immense, unfathomable, violently cold, endlessness of space swallowing them up on all sides. It made a man feel small and _humble_ and he liked to remind himself he was just one tiny fleshy speck in the greater scheme of an unknown universe. 

It did a man good to remember he was insignificant and travelling in a tin can through a hostile environment that would suck him inside out without pause.

\--

“Doctor,” was Spock looking up from a PADD he was casually reading outside of Bones’ door. It was too early in the morning to be the unhappy source of another breaking news story but Spock was there anyway. Looking as straight up and down as he always did—pointy ears and sharp-angled hair—in a freshly pressed uniform that sparkled like he’d discovered the secret to keeping fabric from fading. His arms went behind his back as he inclined his head in a half-greeting before he charged on with, “I admit I was hoping that the Captain would be with you.”

“Why would Jim be—” but Bones just sighed in the middle of his own damn sentence as the door slid shut behind him. “No,” he said with the last ounce of civility he could muster, “Jim doesn’t sleep in my room. So you don’t need to come looking for him here. Why isn’t he in his own room?”

“I do not know,” Spock stated. Because if he did, certainly Spock would be able to reason out where Jim _would_ be when he wasn’t in his room. “As we are due to arrive at Yorktown shortly I was surprised to find that he was not already on the bridge. I have attempted to locate him to share a few anomalies that I have observed in the surrounding space.”

“That sounds fascinating, Spock. I’ll be sure to tell him you were looking for him if I see him.”

Spock lingered there a moment longer. This many years later, Bones could pick out the stress lines and slight flinches that might have been complete expressions on any other man’s face. On Spock they were minute twitches of his eyebrows and slow shifts of muscle beneath skin. There was something (important, perhaps) he was working around to saying. 

“Spit it out,” he said.

“I do not have anything in my mouth, Doctor,” Spock said. It was only his imagination that Spock looked smug about the possible innuendo.

Bones just sighed. “I’m going to work now.” And he went in the direction of the cafeteria to get his coffee and he was going to God-damn hide in sickbay until they docked at Yorktown and there wasn’t a single soul on the ship that could stop him.

(Except Jim, of course. Who wanted him on the bridge. Of course.)

\--

There weren’t enough hours in his day (or his life) to spend too much time wondering about the inner workings of Spock and Uhura’s relationship. The fact that he couldn’t figure out why anyone in possession of a full range of emotions would want to shack up with a Vulcan aside, he couldn’t figure out how the hell Spock and Uhura had started their relationship. Bones knew Uhura because Jim had been gagging to get his hand under her standard-issue-cadet skirt since the first day he saw her.

Her tolerance for him grew from side-eyed frowns and things like: “Train your dog or I’ll neuter him for you.” While Jim was all giggles to the side.

The whole thing with Nero happened and Uhura became Nyota Uhura just so long as you never used her first name to address her (that right seemed to be reserved for people she _liked_ ) and her venomous glares became low sighs, like: “I _almost_ believe he’s never had sex with a farm animal.” (And Bones had asked Jim about that one later in the evening when they had less clothes and no company, expecting to get some context for the statement, he got nothing but Jim’s pink-faced laughter.)

But it settled into a predictable, almost boring sort of affair. The two of them to the side of main even while Spock and Kirk argued regulations and rules, the worth of a man’s deeds and the exact rules of the game of chess they were playing (that day). Jim could argue himself to death without taking a breath and Spock was an unending abyss of helpful objections and noted facts. So it was Uhura and Bones sitting to the side with their elbows on a low table and drinks spread between them.

It started out with formalities like, “so how’s sickbay?” like they office strangers (and they were, more or less) and while Bones groaned about the stupidity of the crew and their homicidal _need_ to touch poisonous plants and fornicate in dangerous places. Uhura complained about undereducated staff; but it was hard to blame people for being average when up against a xenolinguistics genius like her.

They worked their way around to, “so how’s your family?” in the quiet minutes between arguments, when Spock and Kirk had shifted away from rules with games and engaged in a verbal fist fight, each of them trying to get the other to admit that they were wrong about something neither of them (as far as Bones could tell) even cared about. Uhura was sweet smiles and slim bones, sipping her drink with her legs crossed at the knee. 

“Good,” Bones said no matter how they really were. “Good, I just got another video from Joanna. She’s getting big.” And they lapsed into shop talk about daughters and fathers that never quite became familiar enough to address the neon elephant that haunted his every step. He had a daughter, sure he did, and she was far-away-from- _here_ being raised by her Mother and a new man that she didn’t like to call her Dad but he was because he was _there_.

“What about you,” Bones said now and again, “are you going to try to have any kids with,” he motioned at Spock with the tips of his damp fingers and Uhura looked over her shoulder to smile at him with heartbreak in wrinkles around her eyes. “I mean, assuming it’s even possible.”

Uhura was tight-smiles and quick denials. She laid claim to an infinity of time left to consider the possibility and they let the subject drop.

\--

Still, there was no ignoring the obvious when you walked face first into an awkward good-bye. Bones wasn’t Spock’s _friend_ in the more traditional sense of the word but he still didn’t like seeing the particular brand of tightness around his eyes and mouth that indicated some kind of emotional disturbance. If he offered the sage wisdom of, “You know Spock, if an earth girl says it’s me, it’s not you— It’s definitely you.” 

He left it at that, wondering (while he walked away) why he felt ever so slightly disappointed.

\--

Bones wasn’t the sort of man to say _I told you so_ in the middle of life-threatening disasters but now and again it crawled up his throat. There wasn’t enough time-or-space to think about the enormity of what had happened because disasters of this magnitude were _numbing_ , unreal things. Bones had Spock and that was the only thing he could wrap his brain around.

That must have been how they found themselves leaning against a rocky wall, making meaningful small talk (all the while not thinking how they were going to die). Spock was giggling like he’d _absorbed_ Jim and Bones was laughing along with him for a few seconds before the reality of it shattered the desperately wanted good-humor. “My God,” he snapped, “you’re _delusional._ ”

Spock’s whole face was strange with a smile; like the face of a stranger cast in little wrinkles at the edges of his eyes. It would have been a good look for him if it was a sign that he was hemorrhaging into his abdominal cavity. Spock protested with a hand against his chest and a puff of a laugh when Bones rolled up against his side to get a better look at him. “I assure you that I am as well as possible, Doctor,” Spock said. Every word was raw with laughter, altogether making a soft fondness to his voice.

“Yeah, well see that you stay that way,” Bones said. “I don’t want to know who would kill me first—Jim or Uhura.”

Spock’s eyebrow agreed with the sentiment. His hand wasn’t as hot as it usually was pushed against Bones’ chest, but his fingers curled at the tips so they were digging into the meat of his chest just enough to be memorable. “Those are odds not even I could calculate, doctor.” 

“Now you’re making jokes. That’s _not_ the way to be reassuring Spock.” Bones checked over the wound and Spock’s eyes and his pulse and tried to convince himself they were going to survive.

\--

There was a definite, undeniable _relief_ in finding Jim alive. Bones was raised to believe in higher powers and he toed the line that his Grandmother told him to live by, but the closest he had ever come to believing in a divine power was believing in James T Kirk. It was the strangest kind of feeling, tucked into pockets of time between new and old worries—trying to find the mental space to align the things that had happened into sense and failing—that feeling that he had to get his hands on Jim to make sure he was real. His hands were gruff grabbing at Jim’s arms to make physical sense of him, and Jim’s eyes were round and blue and his lips quirked up at the edges. 

“I’m fine, Bones,” was a low sound. 

It shouldn’t have been as easy as that. The immenseness of the worry and fear, the reality of the situation and the nearly guaranteed failure. Reassurance shouldn’t have been as easy as ‘I’m fine, Bones’ but it _was_. Jim was there and everything would be put to right. Bones didn’t have to look any farther than the grimness of his expression to know the truth of it.

\--

As far as Bones was concerned, there were two types of people in the world: the ones that knew there was no point in arguing with him about how he wasn’t authorized to use the medical facilities and that he would need to be attended to himself and the smarter ones that did not try to get in his way.

“Doctor,” Spock said from his left, “I assure you that—”

“Spock,” was Jim from the right. He didn’t say more than that but the implication was a series of gestures that amounted to: “there’s no point in arguing.” And Bones was clenched-fist and ready to fight but Jim slid around him with a slight limp and a definite tenderness in his every motion. He was placating and official, citing all manner of rules and loopholes.

The way was cleared as simple as that (never mind Bones had argued sound medical fact and been ignored) and he grabbed Spock by the sleeve to pull him forward toward the nearest biobed. Jim followed with a shuffling step, one arm across his body to cover his ribs as he took a seat on the biobed across the distance. His feet were swinging like a child’s as the sensors above his head set to work picking up anomalies in his readings. 

“Doctor,” Spock said again. He wasn’t laughing now but blank-faced and _tired_. “You will also need to seek medical attention.” He might have added more to that statement if Bones hadn’t curled his hands into the layers of his shirts and ripped them straight up the front to his throat. He only sighed then.

“See Bones,” Jim was saying behind him with a yawn. He was stretching out on the biobed with a hiss of discomfort. “This is why everyone on the Enterprise thinks you want to have your way with him.” He yawned again. “Wake me up when it’s my turn.”

Spock lifted an eyebrow at that. “While I am flattered,” he said.

“Don’t finish that sentence,” Bones said. “Lay down.” And then he turned his head to shout, “ _Nurse_!”

\--

Chapel found him before Jim woke up. She was whisper-quiet behind him, sneaking on her tiptoes across the overcrowded hospital. There were civilians and crew members stacked everywhere. The gentle snores of the sleeping outmatched only by the steady beeping of the monitors over their beds. 

“You idiot,” she said with the distinct smell of burn cream and the easily-detectable pinkness to her left arm. The nurses that staffed Yorktown’s finest hospital had been patient enough with him but, as far as he was concerned, they were shoddy amateurs in comparison. (Then his Mama liked to tell him that he got too set in his ways; he’d been set in his ways since he was born—that’s what she told him.) “How are they?”

Bones drew in a breath to answer but Chapel was already reading the screens over the bed. Jim’s injuries were minor in a way that didn’t warrant a stay in the hospital. Spock’s injuries were enough to warrant a minor surgery and an overnight stay but there was no keeping one without the other—as soon as he let one get up the other would have followed.

“Come on,” Chapel said. She held out her hand and he let himself be dragged out of the chair he had pulled up to sit in and around the scurrying staff of the hospital. They ducked into a familiar hall and into a supply room with glass doors full of useful things like gauze and cream and tape. “Take your shirt off,” was all business. 

“I’m fine,” he said. “I did a scan—nothing to worry about.”

“Leonard,” Chapel said. Her voice was soft-and-sweet. But her hands were pulling the zipper down at the back of his neck. “I appreciate that you made an attempt to look after yourself. Now let me do a better job.”

“Fine.” He pulled his shirt off over his head and took great satisfaction in the fact that his injuries were profoundly superficial. “But I’m leaving my pants on.” He sat on a table that wasn’t meant to be sat on and Chapel cleaned the scrapes on his arms and shoulder with antiseptic that smelled like death and burnt like white phosphorus. “Where were you?” he asked with his head hanging low between his shoulders and his fingers curled around the edge of the table. 

Reality was an ugly, heavy thing. It settled in the room with them like a beast made of smoke, invading every bright corner before it crept into his chest. There was no imagining the death toll for this catastrophe. There was no trying to make sense of who had survived and who would be mourned. The Enterprise was _on fire_ (maybe) somewhere in the unknown forest of an unknown planet. The corpses of those that hadn’t escaped lying like fuel for the flames in the wrecked halls. 

Chapel bit her lip and she tipped her head to the side. “I was in the prison. Where were you?”

He leaned his head to look at her. “Babysitting a half-dead Vulcan,” he said. “He laughed.”

“Spock?” That seemed to impress her. She finished attending to the wounds and leaned against the supply shelving on the opposite side of the door from where he sat. Her arms were across her filthy uniform and there were tears in her eyes. “How,” she whispered and stopped. Her face screwed up in a grimace as the tears fell across her lashes, “I can’t even _begin_ to process what just happened.” Then she slapped her hands across her thighs. “You need sleep. Come on, they assigned everyone a room. Don’t argue with me or I’ll wake Jim up.”

Bones scoffed at the very idea. “Just let me check on Spock.” 

\--

Uhura was there, with Spock, sitting in the chair he’d abandoned. Her legs crossed at the knee, her hand across her mouth. When she heard him, she ran her fingers across her eyes and looked up at him with the sad attempt at a smile. “Doctor,” she said. “I was just checking on him. They said I was good to go to my room but I didn’t want to leave him without—” 

“Of course,” Bones agreed. 

“Thank you,” Uhura added when he leaned forward to get a better look at the screen. “For saving him—Scotty told me about the crash, and how you helped Spock. If you hadn’t been the one with him—just,” she repeated with a slight smile, “thank you.”

Bones nodded. “You should,” and he motioned toward the exit, “get some sleep. He shouldn’t wake up until the morning.” Because Bones had sedated him so he wouldn’t. “Do you want me to walk you to your room?”

“No thank you. I’m just going to stay another minute. I’ll go to my room soon.” She smiled at him again with her fingertips across her radiation-emitting necklace and he left before he found himself telling her all about her accidental tracking device. 

\--

“Damn it Jim,” was five seconds of consciousness wasted to acknowledge the body that snuck into his room in the dark. It was Jim’s damn arms—familiar and weighted—sliding around his body and the ghost of his breath against the back of Bones’ neck. 

“Go to sleep,” Jim whispered. “I didn’t want you to wake up.”

There was just no point in arguing with that.

\--

Anyone that accused James T Kirk of being a hopeless, heartless womanizer who had lacked the imagination to understand romance had never woken up wrapped up in his octopus limbs, held down by the weight of his intense, almost manic, need for cuddling. Waking up before Jim was rare (despite how it seemed impossible to sleep through being slowly constricted to death) but every time Bones found himself startled into consciousness, he was left with the unenviable choice between waking Jim up to secure his freedom or letting the bastard sleep.

It wasn’t that Bones didn’t enjoy a cuddle when the occasion called for it. It was that Jim’s arms closed around him like he was trying to crack his ribs and his fingers were inside of his clothes and clenched around fabric. It was the sheer level of desperation to maintain the contact that was suffocating. 

In the aftermath of another disaster, Bones rested his hand across the back of Jim’s bare arm and wondered about how Scotty had called Jim lonely. It seemed impossible. The man had ever available outlet for companionship that a man could ask for. He was tripping over people willing to have sex with him, surrounded by people that wanted to speak to him, drowning in intelligent minds waiting to debate with him. There was nearly nothing that Jim could want for in the world.

But his fingers still coiled in Bones’ clothes when he was sleeping, his legs and his arms still held him still and _near_ like the chance he could lose him (even in his sleep, even for a minute) was far too much to consider. 

“Mmm,” Jim mumbled at him. “I thought you’d sleep longer.” The words were slurred with sleep, but the way Jim’s body moved was purposeful enough. His legs found their way between Bones’ thighs with tactical accuracy. His arms slid under Bones’ back until his fingertips found the edges of the bandages. “Chapel?” he mumbled into Bones’ neck. His mouth was foggy and wet, ghosting across Bones’ skin without touching.

“Yes.” But more importantly, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“You know what I think I’m doing.” Jim pushed his weight onto his elbows to lift himself up enough to smile at Bones. One of his hands was sneaking up to comb through his hair—filthy with sweat and blood and dirt as it was—before he bent low enough to kiss him. 

Every objection he had was a good one—from minor injuries to near death experiences. The paperwork that would be expected would be monumental. There was still no death toll; they hadn’t even found all the survivors. There were a thousand things they had left to do before any real sense of finality could be attributed to the situation. Jim would be up-and-out in a minute, whisked away into the tornado of official business and it seemed selfish and silly to keep him there a moment longer than necessary. 

But Bones pulled him closer with hands around his back and rolled them so he was kneeling across Jim’s body. He kissed him without reservation or worry or fear. Bones kissed him because they _survived_ (again) but it was scraping by the skin of their teeth. 

He kissed Jim like a man worshipped a god (and he thought, in between the fingers pulling his clothes off and the wet smacks of their mouths meeting, that his Grandma would just have to understand how all his faith was used up on one damn man).

\--

Spending three years on a damn space ship had destroyed whatever remaining earth sense Bones had left. There was a limited number of people to know and run into (accidentally or on purpose) on the Enterprise and for the most part, the ones he ran into were the same ones he saw the day before and the day before and the day before. So it didn’t strike him as _odd_ or even particularly memorable to run into Uhura two days after Jim left his bed and didn’t come back.

She wasn’t lingering in a doorway so there was no reason to think he’d been set up when she called his name from the bench they were sitting on. In plain clothes, with her hair loose, Uhura looked nothing at all like she did on the job. There was a strange sort of softness that didn’t soak into her voice but stayed all around the outline of her. 

“Hey,” he said. “How’re—”

“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” interrupted his ass’s downward motion to the comfortable looking bench seat. Now his Grandma (and his Mother) raised him to be polite and living with his ex-wife had put a reasonable fear of women into his heart. But there was no accounting for how, not even a full week after a large scale disaster, he found himself more anxious about how getting coffee would turn out than he was worried he’d die with Spock on an unknown planet. 

“Ok,” was his best attempt at not showing fear. His bravery lasted him as long as it took to find a modest coffee shop that wasn’t overwhelmed with nosy ears and busy elbows. Uhura ordered for them with all the authority of a woman who was never told no and Bones just smiled along. They sat at their table while they waited for the fresh-brewed coffee. 

Uhura’s fingers were busy rubbing across her radioactive tracking device while Bones tried very hard not to look at it or think about it or even consider thinking about it. All of his concentrated was caught up in not remembering how they’d managed to locate her on a planet because she was wearing Spock’s dubiously romantic gift to her. 

“So,” he said when the coffee was set down.

“Spock are not getting back together,” Uhura said. The words were very sudden—something akin to a sharp slap across the face. The very sound of them left him with a gaping mouth and a curiously smarting cheek. 

“Well,” Bones started.

“I’ve already talked to Jim,” which would be relevant if Jim were in any way an expert on good post-traumatic event decision making, romance, women or Spock and Uhura’s relationship. Uhura dropped her hand away from the necklace and ran her nail across a blemish on the tabletop. “I know that he talked to you about his plans to leave Starfleet and return to Vulcan II.” There was no telling if the words were encouragement or a threat. 

“Well,” Bones said again. He sat back in his seat and crossed his arms over his chest. “Are you sure? I mean—I’m not expert but he almost got stabbed in the heart and his first instinct was still to find you.”

Uhura smiled, “I’m not angry.” It must have been clear from his face that Bones didn’t believe that for a minute. “I know that Spock loves me and I know that he wants me to be safe and he will always come to save me if I seem that I need to be rescued. I understand—” she looked down at the coffee with a flinch between her eyebrows that was never-ever a good look, “—that he would want to do what he can to further his species. I understand that he’s suffered tremendous loss and that he might _never_ feel as if he has truly made the correct choice. Don’t we all feel that way? Aren’t we all thinking to ourselves, on some level, that we might not have made the best choice? I can understand that.”

“Sure.” He had spent most of his life caught up in a sense of having no idea what the right choice even was. (Most recently and most repeatedly, having sex with Jim and waking up alone on endless repeat seemed like a poor damn life choice.) “But is now the right time to make that choice?”

“We made the choice before all this. I just want you to know that we aren’t getting back together. Things haven’t been stable for a while and there’s no reason to try to work it out when it’s clear that we’ve both already started the process of moving on.”

“You kept his necklace.”

“Well I do still love him.” She picked up her coffee and sipped at it. Her fingers refined as they folded around the little cup. She waited for him to pick up his own and take a swig before she said, “and I hear it’s a perfect tracking device.”

Bones spit coffee _everywhere_ while Uhura laughed at him like a wild animal. She was wheezing out apologies to the shop employees while Bones was red-faced and dabbing at his clothes with a rolled up napkin. He slapped his cup back on the table to glare at her but she was laughing too hard. He shook his head and she just laughed harder. “Why are you telling me anyway?” he asked. “It’s none of my business what you do. Or what he does.”

Uhura was wiping the tears away from her eyes, sparkling pink with momentary glee (at his expense) when she said, “well,” was recovering from the fit, “I figure if I told both you _and_ Jim that Spock was available, one of you would take the initiative.” 

“I do _not_ want to have sex with _Spock_ ,” Bones snapped before he could think better of it. “And you can’t just _move on_ that quickly. I got divorced six years ago and I’m still getting regular death threats along with wage deductions. Don’t tell me that you’re just through and rooting for—why are you smiling?”

“I am rooting for you,” Uhura said. “It will be you or Jim and I’d rather it not be Jim.” 

This was a conversation that Bones felt had veered entirely to the side of unacceptable. “My God,” he said and picked up his cup again. He got it almost all the way to his mouth before the thought hit him, “but what would that even be like?” That was terrible logic to follow and he wasn’t going to imagine it at all. “Jim is infuriating. Spock would nerve pinch him before they had their clothes off.”

“I don’t know,” Uhura countered, “Spock is good at following orders and he’s very used to following Jim’s.”

Now that was an entire line of thought Bones was not equipped to process. He took a drink thinking it would magically transmute itself to whiskey and was disappointed to taste only coffee. “That’s the last thing the ship needs. For Jim to get another ego boost.” He shook his head and looked over at Uhura. 

She was pink all around the eyes and looking down at the smooth surface of her coffee. Her thumb was restless in its motion going up-down-up-down while she sighed. “I respect Jim and I like him. But I don’t want Spock to want _him_. Anyone—any _one_ else but him.” When she looked up her smile was raw and the tears she was fighting back were going over her lashes. “It’s selfish and it’s stupid, but that’s how I feel.”

There was no backing out of that conversation or the implication that he was interested or should pursue Spock (both objectives best fitted to madmen and dedicated women, really). Bones may have worked his way around to saying something near to the correct response but he was saved the trouble.

Uhura cleared her throat, “the Captain said we might have a chance at shore leave, and considering the disaster that this was—we may get free passage to wherever we’d like to go on a rotating three week basis while they determine if the ship can be fixed.” Then she drew in another breath. “I think I’d like to go home for a while, really clear my head.”

“Yeah,” Bones agreed. “Home would be good.”

\--

Jim didn’t invite himself back into Bones’ (bed) life for another two days. By the time he showed up—sometime after dinner but before bed—the bruises on his face had turned an ugly greenish color and fattened out into low rings beneath his eye. His uniform had the distinct look of having been worn too many days without rest the way his mouth was slanted into a hungry frown. 

“Any chance you’d make me dinner if I promise to stay until you wake up tomorrow?” Which just went to show that Bones’ needed to up his standards. 

“Sure,” had so much sarcasm dripping from it, Bones almost tried to wipe the excess off the floor with his sock. He was halfway through trying to read a medical journal, thumb pressed against his temple to drill out the ricocheting memories of Spock’s blood on his hands and the sound of his laughter. The thought of the bodies they’d left behind and the ones that they’d never find—sucked into the endless vacuum of space like they had been. Those people were debris among the stars, scattered and lost for an eternity. There was nothing left behind for their families to cry over; nothing left to bury or burn. 

The enormity of it; the narrow escape and the slow slide down from an awful high (of survival, of victory, of glorious battle) had caught him in a low so deep it seemed every thought he had would collapse on itself and bury him alive. 

Jim was an ass; there was no disputing facts like that. But Jim _understood_ with his knees bending and his hands gripping Bones’ thighs as he threw his hat to the side. Jim fit between his knees like he’d built himself a permanent home there, leaning forward with his chin against Bones’ belly and his arms circling loosely around his waist. “What can I do?”

“Tell me more survived than died,” Bones said. “Tell me we did the best we could—tell me, fuck, Jim. How do you make this okay? How do we just keep moving on from this? How many people can we outlive before you start asking yourself why we deserve it?”

“More survived than died,” Jim whispered. “We pulled a miracle out of our ass, Bones. We did better than our best. This,” he punctuated that with his fingers knocking against Bones’ sides like tacking emphasis to the word, “will _never_ be okay. We move because if we stand still we die.”

“What happens when you finally go against a situation you can’t win?” Bones whispered. Because he’d rolled his faith up and gave it away to this stupid man with his idiot blue eyes and his chapped-pink lips. He thought there should be blasphemy in that so great no deity could forgive him. He thought he should be begging forgiveness from the God he had been born with but Jim’s hands were under his shirt, pulling at his skin like pulling him toward the inevitable conclusion.

“If I can’t win, you can—Spock can, Scotty can, Uhura can, Sulu can, Chekov _can_.” He pulled and he pulled until Bones was in his lap but not on the couch. The two of them so close any man would be forgiven for assuming they were a four-limbed, two headed hybrid. The official smell of Federation soap and shampoo on Jim’s body was offensive but the stink of his sweat beneath it was familiar enough.

“I don’t want to die alone,” Bones said, “I don’t want to die in space.” 

Jim kissed him like he understood; like James fucking T God damn Kirk had ever taken the appropriate amount of time to feel something as immense as mortality. (Maybe he had, away from where eyes could see, maybe he had in the half-seconds between disasters. Maybe he had, and he had a place he wanted to die in—like a thought in his head he kept in golden sunlight with a perfect breeze.) “I’ll do what I can, Bones.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear Spock/Bones is happening. I swear it is.

Being a doctor (such as he was) afforded him nothing but a veritable buffet of awkward situations. From the sheepish patient with a rotting nether region working through the pink-faced shame of admitting he may or may not have stuck his dangling parts into a flower (of all things) to the belligerent ones demanding time off for minor colds. Then there were the lady patients of chaste societies that saw him like some kind of great bully (or oversexed threat, he was never sure). Being a doctor had gotten him beaten with a purse by old women in Georgia that cursed him for being a brute and practicing shoddy medicine, and it had gotten him attacked with lecherous intent at the academy (not just by Jim) as a show of gratitude. He had stared with lax-bored-face at every crew member in every conceivable state of undress that had ever even been conceived and despite all that experience under his belt and a growing sense of believing he just couldn’t be stuck in a more awkward position than the many he’d already been in, Bones just kept founding new cavernously deep valleys of awkward.

Like standing in Spock’s doorway with his hands behind his back and his brain stuck on a perpetual blank. Spock across the threshold from him wearing regulation-issue-clothes (minus the blue shirt) because they owned nothing and that definitely meant Spock owned no fashionable Vulcan robes. (Not that they were exactly fashionable.) The standstill had been dragging on with steel-like persistence for going on a full fifty seconds. Spock had no spoken and Bones had not opened his mouth so they were both standing there making minute motions with their eyebrows. 

It was exactly the sort of thing that the god-damned gossip rag loved to write about but Bones didn’t actually speak Vulcan-eyebrow and he had never successfully conveyed his message through facial expressions alone. (Because he was 100% sure that he had never made an expression that said, ‘why yes Jim what a brilliant idea, go for it! I wish you good luck’ and it seemed that Jim had never interpreted his meaning any other way.) 

It was just the longer the silence persisted, the harder it was to break.

Spock drew in a breath and stepped so he was to the side of the door, one of his arms came from where it was resting behind his back to motion inward toward his room. “Would you like to come in?” he asked. 

“No,” Bones said. (At which point, there was simply no pretending he could escape this situation.) Then he sighed. “I just came to see how you were doing.”

“I believe I am fully recovered, Doctor.” Spock waited until he was inside before folding his arm behind his back again. He was at ease but watching Bones while he stood there trying to limit his own sense of not-belonging. After _another_ ten seconds of agonizing silence, Spock’s eyebrow raised, “did you have another purpose?”

Bones rolled his eyes, “I don’t know, Spock.” Because, it seemed to him, that despite having woken up with the resolve to go and see Spock and the full intention of checking him over for any side-effects of almost having his heart cut in two by shrapnel, he had no idea why he was there.

“You’ll forgive me Doctor, but I am confused. Should you not know your own intentions?”

Now that he wasn’t concentrating on keeping his teeth clenched shut and his tongue from making noise, Bones had the sense to see the little stress lines tucked into the neutral mask of Spock’s face. He could see where the dull silence had failed to bring solace and it should have done just about anything to him but make him relax. “Damn it, Spock,” was the softest thing he’d ever said to him. “I just—” _wanted to see you_ seemed too fond and too mushy. It was that sort of thing that Spock could sweep away as nonsense based on emotion. “wanted to make sure you were well,” of course he did. “As your doctor.” 

“Did Lt. Uhura speak to you about the permanent dissolution of our relationship?” Spock asked.

“Yes,” Bones said. His hands found their way into his pockets. He was a damned school boy on the porch of a pretty damn girl, waiting for her to invite him in for sweet tea and pie. If he stood still long enough he could probably hear the bugs sawing in the woods and smell the damp red clay. 

Spock was quiet a moment (but not silent, exactly) before he cleared his throat, “I appreciate your concern, Doctor. I assure you that I am well.” Then, because the room was suffocating in persistent silence again, “I believe we should arrange a gathering among the crew. The Captain had mentioned it yesterday but I do not believe he’s had time to arrange anything.”

“Sure,” Bones said. “I’ll get the word out to the gossip rag we’re having a drink for Jim’s birthday. That ought to bring them all out.” He was smirking at the stupidity of that statement before the cold dread of reality had long enough to seep in. (Was there even a gossip rag in the wake of the tragedy? Were the nameless editors of the damn thing space debris, or were they whole and in relative good health still?) He frowned at the thought, at the stupidity of it, and then said, “I’ll work on it.”

“Of course,” Spock said like there were a dozen other things he meant to say. 

\--

Bones was(not) drunk when he said, ‘are you sure you want to go back out there’ because he had(not) forgotten that they were standing in the center of a snowglobe in space. They weren’t ‘going back’ because they were still ‘out there’ but Spock and Jim and _everyone_ was still gazing outward with wanderlust thinking big thoughts about their next adventure.

But it was too soon to be thinking about the _next_ adventure when Jim was still sporting the black eye from the last one. They were drunk on the power of their own accomplishment (as if survival such as this could be counted as a victory) and it spread through the crowd like a jolt of energy. Everyone was giddy like they were in manic need of it. 

Bones didn’t blame them; he was tucked away at a table with a bottle of scotch and a large glass. Halfway to fully drunk as he was, he was a host of goodwill, thinking about how he was going to pass out hangover pills before everyone left. Imagining it drove away the loneliness and the sense of desperation he got from looking out at the thinned-out crowd. There were a half-dozen faces he knew were missing. (Six or seven of them part of his own medbay staff, another three or four regulars of his breakfast-slash-coffee trip to the mess hall, one or three of them rotating members of the bridge crew.) Their names were laced into the scotch and they burned down his throat with bitter regret.

Selflessness had never been his strong suit because he wasn’t even halfway through figuring out how many were missing (and exactly how many of them he’d known more personally than doctor-patient confidentiality) before he settled on watching Jim in a corner with his pink cheeks and his hand across his body, laughing with his head back. Spock was standing a quiet lover’s distance from his elbow. It was hard to tell from so far away (or after so much to drink) but it seemed like Spock was making a happy face as he inclined his head. 

There was nothing but piggish greed in his head, Bones was thinking: _I’ve heard Spock laugh_ like he could keep that wrapped up in his gut and have something to hold over the miserable lot of survivors that might try to flirt with him. But then he was thinking, _everyone’s heard Jim laugh_ because there was no keeping James T. fucking Kirk quiet when he wanted to laugh. Like now, when he was red-spotted with mirth and gripping his arm just above Spock’s bent elbow. They were saying something back-and-forth like Spock had any sense of humor or Jim had any good sense.

So it wasn’t hard to make something of the spectacle. It wasn’t hard to imagine where else Jim’s fingers would go if they were given the chance. (Hell, considering Bones had had the misfortune to walk in on Jim not once but a dozen times while the was fucking, it wasn’t hard to imagine anything.) For that matter, Bones had been seduced by the bastard when they were both idiot cadets at the Academy. Red was a terrible color on Jim but it didn’t matter, because he could wear a God-damn potato-sack and he could still seduce someone out of their clothes.

Women (and men, and those that did not fall into such narrow categories) had spent (what felt like) half of Bones’ life talking in pockets around him, trying to work out how Jim wiggled his way into so many panties in his life. They were full of notions about his pretty blue eyes and his mouth and his voice and his _arms_ but the sum total of Jim’s parts was a hollow collection of attractive bits with no substance. Jim pulled people in like a damned black hole because there was something in the edge of his smile and some promise of unknown depth that could be sensed but not measured.

Bones had been getting fucked by the bastard for going-on half a dozen years and he still hadn’t figured out what it was about Jim that kept him coming back. Whatever took up space there in the center of him, it sucked out all common sense and reason, and there was no escaping it.

Someone like Spock (in his humble, _doctor_ ’s opinion) should have known better. Spock studied space for anomalies and oddities so it seemed like (just from an outsider’s point of view) it should have been easy enough to spot the tell-tale signs of a bad idea. But there he was, hapless as any creature caught in the magnetic pull of Jim’s easy seduction. It was like watching a man drown.

(Or it might have been, he figured. Maybe. If Bones weren’t the one up to his eyeballs in liquor.)

\--

Bones didn’t wake up with Chapel but he didn’t wake up in his own bed either. Most accurately he didn’t wake up in a bed at all, but awkwardly coiled up on a couch that seemed better fitted to man approximately as tall as Keenser (that is to say, someone shorter than him). Besides the splitting headache, the crick in his neck and the flip-flopping of his stomach, Bones figured he escaped the whole ordeal relatively unscathed. 

In fact, Chapel brought him breakfast and sat in the chair next to the cardboard couch wearing a big-fluffy bathrobe with her hair tucked behind her ears. She had a fresh-scrubbed face and a cup of tea that smelled like something had crawled into the cup and died (that she insisted tasted delicious) as she looked at him through the steam. 

“What?” It was simply too early in the day for a woman to be looking at him like she knew something he’d never understand. He hadn’t even had a half-minute to appreciate the finer points of the black cup of coffee and the full plate of breakfast waiting for him. The smell of bacon was so crisp it was almost a flavor on his tongue. 

Rather than answer outright, Chapel picked up the slim PADD resting on the arm of the chair and cleared her throat, “Trouble in Paradise!” the capitals little points of emphasis in her tone, “will the best man win?” Then she cocked up her eyebrows like he could divine the meaning of that bullshit. When he failed her (as he usually did, in all things not related to medicine), she coughed a little laugh. “Apparently, everyone now knows that Spock is single and that you and Jim Kirk are racing to win him.”

“After breakfast.” He might have tried to stall out the conversation indefinitely but there was simply no way to keep Chapel from pursuing the amusement now that she had it. So he ate and she sipped in silence while the contemplated the greater implications of the fact that people had died and the ship was destroyed the authors and distributors of the gossip rag not only survived but reclaimed their station with startling immediacy. 

“Dr. McCoy,” started just before he finished mopping the egg yolk off his plate, “remains true to form, drawn to the wreckage of another failed relationship, he cannot seem to stop himself from scavenging for the juiciest part of the corpse. Typically unopposed in his quest, the good doctor seems to have encountered an unlikely competitor in the form of Captain James T. Kirk,” thank God they used his full name or nobody would know they were talking about Jim. “Captain Kirk is a formidable foe in the area of seduction; a well-known Casanova that has successfully made a sexual buffet out of the known universe it seems this is one fight that Dr. McCoy will not win just by showing up.”

“Does it matter that I do not actually want to have sex with Spock?” 

“It doesn’t matter that you’re a liar,” she set the PADD aside and sipped at her tea again. “I was just highlight the best parts.”

“I’m not lying.” He didn’t protest too much either. “And I do not sort through the wreckage like a sex vulture! I haven’t even—”

“Three of the last four people you’ve had sex with were within six days of breaking up with their former lover.” Every single word called him a liar with a pointed stare and a quirk of her eyebrow. There was absolutely nothing forgiving about her expression.

“It’s been months.”

Chapel set her tea cup down on the table and then got up to shuffle over to him and dropped into the couch so close to his side, they were in danger of melting into one person. Her fingers found their way to the short hairs at the nape of his neck. “I don’t care,” she said to him when there was nothing to hide between them. The smell of her breath was processed death-tea, but her hair was like wild strawberries. “I don’t even think it’s about you. We all—everyone needs that sense of normal that we’ve lost.”

“Why can’t normal be something besides speculating who I’m going to sleep with next?” He wound his arm around her shoulders and slouched into the couch. “Why the hell do people even care?”

“I don’t know.” Her fingertips were spinning in circles, coiling his hair into ringlets (that wouldn’t hold, not even when he hadn’t washed his hair in two days). “What are we going to do now? There’s too much gossip, there’s not enough answers. I heard they’re breaking the crew apart, everyone is being reassigned until the Enterprise is fixed. There’s no guarantee that we’ll come back together. Maybe we shouldn’t,” she leaned her cheek against his shoulder. “Maybe it’ll be easier if we don’t.”

“Jim’ll keep us together if that’s what we want.”

“Is that what we want?”

That was a dark tunnel at the bottom of a deep ravine of thought that he just hadn’t given himself the time or permission to pursue. It seemed like a thought puzzle that Spock would like to logic out, to assign values like numbers to mental health and best-possible-outcomes. Bones was all-gut and minimal knowledge, but there were snares in his lines of his thought. “I don’t know; I guess that’s something that everyone’s gotta figure out for themselves. I’m going where Jim goes.” _As long as they’ll let me._

Chapel sighed at that, all in her chest and shoulders, with her head tipped back and her smile crooked. “Is that because you love him?”

A snort didn’t seem powerful enough to convey what he thought on that account. “I think you’re getting reality confused with your gossip papers again.”

“No, I think you’re getting reality—”

“Because I sleep with Jim but I don’t—”

“Confused again because there is absolutely no denying that you—”

“Love Jim.” 

Chapel rolled her eyes as the last syllable faded. Her arm slithered free from behind his back and she put them at angles so she could get the distance to stare at him. As far as he knew she was born and raised somewhere with snow and nowhere at all where he’d grown up with his shrewd-and-pretty-faced sister (staring at him with narrow eyes and long expectations) but it was easy to forget it. “Doctor, I think you need to have your head checked. You’ve become delusional.” She even pulled his eyelid up with her thumb like she was checking his pupils for signs of damage.

“Damn it,” he snapped at her, “I don’t keep my heart in my penis, Christine.” (He could count on one hand the number of times he had thought of or used her first name. This was the second time it had been about Jim.) “I don’t want to stay with Jim because I _love_ him. There’s no God-damn sense in following him around mooning over him when he doesn’t even know how to give a shit about a person—”

“Oh please,” she snapped back. “If matters of the heart made _sense_ , Spock would consider Valentines an intergalactic logic holiday.”

“I don’t have to love him to trust him!”

“Well, it certainly helps. While you and the whole damn bridge crew are mooning over how reliable old blue eyes is, the ones of us not mesmerized by his charm don’t have the same assurance!”

“Bullshit.” He shifted his body so they were opposite one another, flailing their arms in the space to the side, like they had something to point at. “Jim has never—”

“He doesn’t even want to be here!” she shouted back at him. “He walks around like he’s dying! How do you have faith in that? How?”

“Because I don’t want to die alone,” Bones yelled back at her. And that brought the whole commotion to a standstill. A frosty point in the middle of the shouting, where there was nothing but the fresh-slapped look of shock on her face and the pink of his cheeks caught between aggression and embarrassment. “I don’t want to die alone, in space. I’m not alone with him but that doesn’t mean I’m in love with him.”

Chapel’s shoulders slid down, her whole body seemed to deflate at the words. “Yeah, well,” was searching for a point of contention, “Jim’s lucky. People he cares about—that luck is like a shell, it keeps you safe inside of it. The people he doesn’t? They’re space debris.” She had tears in her eyes and a whole flood of them caught in her head. Her voice was worked-over and raw, “so I don’t even know why you have so much faith in him.”

“This wasn’t his fault,” Bones said. 

“Wasn’t it somebody’s fault? Isn’t it his job to protect them?” Her knuckles were shoving into her eye sockets like she could hold back the tears but her face was spotting up red-over-white. His hand felt too big and gruff coiling up in her bathrobe and her body was too small against his when she let him hug her. He closed his eyes with her cheek against her hair. She cried with her hands like claws, pulling at his clothes. 

“Jim saved all our lives,” Bones said when the crying quieted. Like he could define the faith he had in his chest, wrapped around all his organs like coiling snake. “None of us should have survived against the Narada. We shouldn’t have defeated Nero. We are all alive because of Jim. It’s all time we were never should have had—”

Chapel wiped her eyes with her delicate fingertips and leaned against the back of the couch again. “I believe,” her voice cracked, “that as long as he’s alive, Jim will never give up. I do believe that. I just don’t believe it like you do. It doesn’t help me feel better. My friends are still dead. I still have nightmares. I’m still alone.”

Bones leaned back next to her with his arm across her shoulders again. “I’m with you.”

“Because you’re a slut,” she said. And her smile was _begging_ him for any reprieve from the conversation. 

“If you wanted to believe my ex-wife, yes. I never cheated on her but she keeps saying I must have.” He sighed. “As if I had any time to do anything with my dick in between working and going to school and Joanna. If I had the power to stop time, I would have been sleeping not fucking around.”

Chapel snorted. “Why does she think you cheated on her?”

“Because she cheated on me.” He’d kept that secret like a coal in his chest, sitting right under his heart, heating up his body with pure fury ever since he found out. She might have taken everything (and his kid) from him but none of it bothered him the same. “We were never going to make it anyway.”

“I just can’t imagine what you must have been like, married and faithful. You really are a slut.” She leaned her head against his shoulder. Her sigh was a shudder and her fingers were busy in knots around the ends of her bathrobe. “Tell me about Georgia,” she said like a whisper. “Tell me about chasing the bugs that light up after dark. I like that story.”

Bones was going to sigh but the memory of fireflies caught him somewhere below the ribs and turned his guts to knots of homesickness. He closed his eyes with his arm around her shoulders and he spilled out the story of long-summer nights with sticky-kid-fingers and old glass-jars, chasing after bugs with his sister. 

\--

There was enough gossip flying around Yorktown to keep the Enterprise Daily (the official title of the gossip rag) churning out new issues on a daily basis. Bones got the notifications in his inbox about how he was trying to work his way into a certain Science Officers Very Official Pants so he hid out in his room and took his daily walks in directions sure to keep him far from wherever Spock was. He heard from Jim early mornings and late nights after sorting out bureaucracy and an ongoing rescue mission to find any other members of their crew (or any crew) still orbiting the planet or lost in the forest of the planet. 

In between those bright spots of noise (like static on old AM/FM radios) there was a creeping stillness that slunk across the floor snake-like and cloudy. It took up a place under his bed, growing like weeds across his fingers left hanging off the side until it was peeking in through his ears to find a good way to get to his heart. 

Looking for Scotty was synonymous with looking for a stiff drink and he told himself it was looking for company and not liquor but they were still sitting opposite one another at a bar with a PADD between them and zero pretenses about discussing anything. Bones had meandered along pretending to be interested in the current plans regarding the broken skeleton of the Enterprise and Scotty had pretended to acknowledge that Bones was looking a little more wan than normal.

But then there was liquor and lots of it, so they were red-cheeked and _loud_.

“You know,” Scotty was saying (no, slurring) with his accent like a slow-cranking drawbridge, getting steadily farther and farther away from understandable. “I do respect the wee lassie. I mean—you cannot help it but respect her. It’d be like if someone didn’t respect—you know, _Jim_. It just wouldn’t happen.”

Bones was nodding and sipping and following along. He thought (but wasn’t sure) that they were talking about Jaylah and how she was amazing. Scotty was skipping around his part of the script because one minute he was listing her aptitude and her gumption and the next he was sighing into his drink saying something like: 

“And I feel like an old pervert for thinking about it but she’s a fine looking lady.”

“The ship?” Bones asked.

“No! The _girl_.” Scotty leaned forward (as if they needed secrecy for the confession) and said, “I don’t even know how old she is, you know? I know how old I am and that’s far too old. I don’t even want to—but it’s hard to keep from noticing it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He set his empty glass on the table and straightened up in the chair so he could lean forward to match Scotty’s lean. Their fingers were touching like they were talking about something that mattered. 

“She’s not Jim Kirk, if that’s what you mean,” Scotty agreed, “but imagine that she were and you were only trying to help her get to the Academy because she’s got so much potential and then you’re just trying to go to sleep and you got nothing but a—”

“No,” Bones burped and waved his hand to dissipate the smell of it, “that doesn’t happen to me. I don’t want to have sex with someone unless I know them.” Which was far too much information to share with anyone as drunk as Scotty was.

“What?” was pure confusion and Scotty brought his hand up to cup the air like he could pull the answer from the air itself. “So you want to sleep with me?”

“Uh, no.” He shifted on his seat again. “But I also don’t think strangers are attractive. Call me old fashion but I like to know something about a person before I go thinking about taking their clothes off. My ex-wife used to say I was the blindest good looking man she’d ever met.” He smiled at the waitress that stopped by the table to offer him a new drink and took a swig of it before he set it down. “Of course, she also used to think I was so blind I’d never cheat on her. Now I’m an intergalactic slut.” He shrugged.

Scotty was still making the same face, cramped with confusion, grasping at the air for understanding. “Bullshit.”

Bones laughed and shrugged again. “Don’t worry about—uh—whatever you were talking about.”

“Well I have to worry about it!” Scotty picked up his own glass, found it woefully half empty and jerked around in search of the waitress to attend to it. “I want it to stop. I want to respect her for the girl she is.” He set his glass down with a pout. “Remember when she sat in the captain’s chair?”

“I remember Jim’s face.” It had been a pitch perfect sort of expression, caught between mortal offense and stagnant attempts at cooperation. Jim was-a-genius and-a-god (more or less) but Jim was a spoiled child who-never-ever- _shared_. “She’s hot, you can think about that. We all do it.”

“You just said you didn’t,” Scotty snapped back.

“I think about it, just not until I know them. They’re attractive because I know them. Same principle, different execution. How much longer are you even going to be around her anyway, Scotty? You can make it.”

He made a woeful sound and dropped his head down to rest against his arm. After a moment of incomprehensible moaning, he lifted his head up again with his eyes narrowed and his cheeks fading back toward sober. “So, you’re actually attracted to Spock’s personality? That’s why you want to have sex with him?” 

Bones scoffed, “yes,” he said with sarcasm so thick it was drool on his chin, “nothing does it for me like a man who can calculate the odds of my death to the sixth decimal point.”

Scotty was working out if that were true or not when his refilled drink arrived. The thinking was helped by liberal application of liquor because he slapped his mug down to say, “I got it!” The bar was loud enough to swallow the sound but Bones was close enough he would have to hear whatever was said regardless. “You want him because Jim does. Right?”

No. “Or I don’t want him at all.” Then he lifted his drink to salute the truth and finished it off with one long swallow. “Tell me about the Enterprise. What are they going to do?”

Scotty groaned like he was dying and fumbled for the PADD. His tongue was too drunk to make sense of his words but Bones was willing to listen to anything in the world except for theories on how he wanted to mate with Spock.

\--

Jim was a philosopher with come on his stomach and a fresh-fucked pink to his cheeks. His body was a topographical wet dream spread across Bones’ borrowed mattress. From the tilt of his bent knee to the uneven planes of his gut and his chest, the dip of his lazy arms down by his sides and the little peaks of his chin and his nose as he sighed at the ceiling. Loose-and-easy like he was, Jim’s voice was a melody in the quiet of the room. “I just didn’t think I could do it anymore,” he was saying like Bones had asked a question somewhere in the middle of fucking him. 

“Do what?” Bones was a polite host and a great friend and that was why he threw the damp, warm rag on Jim so he could clean himself up. He collapsed back onto the bed to look at the same ceiling that Jim was but there was no hidden meaning in the surface of it for him. “Orgasm?”

“I can always orgasm more,” Jim said. He finished cleaning himself up with an admirable lack of shame or grace and threw the rag toward the bathroom. His body rolling made the bed sway. His lips were vivid pink to match the fading blush on his shoulders and his cheeks, “I had put in a transfer request. I was going to leave the Enterprise.”

“What?”

“I didn’t think I—”

Bones shook his head as he rolled away from Jim to sit on the edge of the bed. His clothes were disgraced heaps on the floor, easily distinguished from Jim’s from how useless they were. He grabbed his pants as Jim’s fingers ran down his back. He was up and away from the bed before Jim could get his octopus arms around him. “Well that’s _fine_ ,” he said. “What difference does it make to the rest of us if you leave—that’s how it works, I guess. Just, you know, as the person who gets fucked by you more than most, and your _friend_ I thought I would have merited at least an invite to conversation.” 

“Bones,” Jim said. He scooted forward with his hand lifting skyward, and his feet hitting the floor. “I would have told you if it had been a real decision.”

“A _real_ decision,” Bones shouted back at him. He picked up his shirt and shook it out. Not that space stations like this were bit on dust and dirt, the whole giant glass orb was recycled air and water. “James T. Kirk doesn’t make _theoretical_ decisions. If you asked for a transfer that seems pretty damn final to me.” He gave up on the shirt and threw it toward the bathroom.

Jim was looking at him with _pity_ that grated on every nerve that Bones had (or had ever had, or would ever grow) so when his lips parted with that faint, wet sound, Bones interrupted him with—

“Just don’t,” like it would make a difference.

“I didn’t want you to make me feel better,” he said. Then his shoulders lifted and dropped. “I just wanted to get out.” His tongue was pink and slick across his lips and while his expression shifted to something approaching condescension the pity was stuck in the blue of his eyes. “They told me they have a job opening they would like you to consider if you’re up for staying here for a while. The Admiral asked me if I had any idea if you would accept and I told him I hadn’t talked to you about it.”

“Oh sure,” Bones snapped, “I’ll just get stationed here and you and _Spock_ and every other _surviving_ member of the crew can go wherever you want.”

Jim sighed, his hand rubbed the back of his neck. “Have you called your sister?”

“What the hell does she have to do with it?” 

There was that pity, like disbelief, and Jim nodded his head. He bent forward to grab the pants off the floor. They were armor when he pulled them on, and the scene reset like they hadn’t just been fucking. Jim was Jim and Bones was Leonard H. McCoy and they were friends with pants on. Jim’s body radiated heat in the space closest to him, his hands were rough fingers and scratchy palms against his shoulders. “You should call your sister. Talk to your daughter—there’s shore leave and free passage to anyone that wants it.”

“Fuck you,” Bones said.

Jim’s lips quirked at the edges before he leaned forward to kiss him. Bones shoved him back with the back of his arm. “Let me know what you decide, Bones.” And there at the door, he paused and looked back, “I need to know who I’m fighting to keep.” He let himself out without another word.

\--

“Doctor,” interrupted Bones between the door of the establishment and the counter where the coffee was made. Consider that he’d known the man for the past three years (and a few before that) and he had never once (not even in hallucinations) saw the man drink coffee it was entirely _impossible_ to believe that they had come to meet one another by accident. Spock was standing there with his arms behind his back and the poise of a man who had simply been waiting without any sense of urgency. 

Far worse than assholes sending other assholes to check up on him was being so predictable that it was this easy.

“Spock,” Bones said.

Spock inclined his head and then reached to the table next to him and picked up a to-go cup which he offered to Bones. “I took the liberty of ordering your usual.” Then he motioned them both toward the door, away from the strangers with nosy ears that were glancing at them across the top of their PADDs. “I believe we should talk.”

“Sure,” Bones said. 

The talk started as a walk, the aimless motion of their feet and legs. He sipped his coffee without hurry while Spock watched the crowd without finding anything. Their legs matched up in stride around the second turn and they fell into a comfortable rhythm. It was _familiar_ (of course it was) and therefore _comforting_ and Bones would have been offended by that if the coffee hadn’t been so good.

“Doctor,” Spock said again. “The Captain is worried about you.”

“He’s a dick,” Bones said back. “A huge dick.”

Spock’s eyebrow lifted toward his hairline and his feet came to a full stop that pulled Bones into a neat circle to face him. There was no blush on Spock’s face but the clear amusement at the choice of words. “I admit that you are more of an expert on Jim than even I. I will trust your assessment.” 

Which, of course, just figured. Bones was one third the way to a good retort when Spock motioned to the side with a slight tilt of his head and resumed walking. “Figures,” he muttered the empty air in front of him. “And _what_ exactly did Jim think you were going to do about it?”

There was a pause, just enough time for their legs to sync up in motion and Spock to glance at him. The amusement on his face seemed to shift into something unreadable and his voice had a quality that belonged on a planet not-so-far away where they were being hunted like animals. He said, “The Captain did not ask me to do anything. He did confide that he felt you were having some difficulty in the aftermath of the attack and expressed that he was unsure of how he could be of any assistance.” But the flow of the words stuttered there, babbling across loose rocks before coming to a sudden standstill.

Far be it for Bones to escape a situation without making it more awkward because his mouth was opening up with, “his dick isn’t actually huge. I meant I was angry at him.”

“Yes, good.”

“I haven’t had a chance to look up average penis sizes since I was in med school but I’m fairly sure it’s not anything to throw a parade over—not even on Vulcan.” He nodded his head too. It seemed like the kind of thing needed to punctuate how incredibly stupid his mouth was being. When he glanced over at Spock, he found him standing still with his eyes in narrow slits and his mouth pulled down into a taut, worried line. “What?” he asked.

Spock’s face was drawn into a pinch, he spit out, “are there records of average Vulcan penis size in your medical books on Earth?” like it was a sour sore on his tongue. 

“No.” Of course there weren’t. Vulcans were far too prudish to publish such personal details about their bodies. He’d be surprised if any group of Vulcans had ever been possessed of enough ingenuity to even try to figure out the average size of their penises (unless it was for some kind of dry biology text). Spock seemed to relax. “But the internet knows everything.”

“Doctor,” Spock said.

“Relax.” He put his hand on Spock’s chest (warmer than it had been last time he touched the man) and looked right at his face. He slapped his best reassuring look on and made a concentrated effort at making his voice soft and private, “I won’t tell anyone that doesn’t already know.”

“ _Doctor_ ,” Spock said again. “While I appreciate the attempt at levity—” which he didn’t appear to, “it is really very inappropriate for—”

“Relax Spock.”

“—such records to exist so if they are—”

“I was _kidding_.” He waited for Spock to relax out of hurried speech and leaning shoulders. When he did, it left him somewhat stunned—lax and speechless—while the two of them gazed at one another on a street corner. Bones’ hand was in no hurry to leave the warmth of Spock’s chest and Spock either didn’t care about the closeness or liked it (what a thought) so he did not move away. “Great, now I’ve broken you.”

“You have not _broken_ me, Doctor. I am merely trying to comprehend what passes for humor in the minds of the average human male.” He stared a moment longer. “Are you well, Doctor?”

No. Bones rolled his eyes. “ _I_ ’m the doctor, Spock. I spent half my life learning how to figure out who is and isn’t well. I think I’d be the first to know if I wasn’t. What about you?” He started moving again because standing still was noticing the pale little marks across Spock’s nose that might have been freckles once. It was noticing that his bangs were growing out in uneven little spikes if you looked hard enough. It was the smell of Spock—dry and sandy—and the heat of his body standing so close. He was firm like hard-packed-dirt under Bones’ hand and even with the flimsy shield of logic to protect him, the softness to Spock’s face was intimate but undefinable. 

“I am well.” Spock walked next to him for another block.

“What are they doing with you? Any offers for temporary positions? Shore leave? You could go see your Father.”

Spock was nodding along with the suggestion. “I did consider the merits of visiting my Father. I believe that after experiences such as ours, it is typical of any living creature to covet the perception of safety that often accompanies their memory of their first home. As my home no longer exists, I find that I have no special desire to travel anywhere. I have been offered a temporary position at Yorktown.” 

“Are you going to take it?”

There again, that strangeness of Spock’s face was something he’d never seen before. “Do you plan to accept the position they have offered you?”

“I don’t know,” Bones said. He looked around for anywhere to leave his cup and found that there was nowhere readily available to accept paper cups. (It seemed to him that Yorktown would have a better recycling system) so he just held it loosely between his fingers. “Look, tell Jim I’m fine.”

“Vulcans do not lie.”

No, of course they didn’t. “Then don’t tell him anything. The last thing I need is God damn James T Kirk trying to fix something that doesn’t need fixing. Can Vulcans do that?”

“Of course,” Spock said. And just when it seemed like Bones was going to be able to make a clean getaway, Spock said, “your childhood home is intact, Doctor. I imagine that your family, especially your daughter, would enjoy a visit.”

That was like a punch in the gut; the kind of thing that a man just didn’t recover from with grace. Bones nodded his head, “thank you, Spock. I’ll think about it.” 

(Then he ran for it.)

\--

Chapel invited herself over to his place in the morning with a platter of homemade biscuits (nothing at all like what his Mama made), a bottle of some green juice, and a PADD under her arm. As soon as the door was closed and her shoes were off, she said, “so I hear you’re making out with Spock on street corners now.” 

Bones cleared off the table in the kitchenette portion of his room so she had a place to sit the biscuits down. He washed a glass or two (since he hadn’t yet) and set them on the table. She pulled a jar of jam out of her pocket and set it down between them. 

“So,” prompted him into spilling the beans that he had no intention of cooking. 

“I didn’t make out with Spock.”

“But did you break up with Jim?” Chapel sat in the tall chair opposite where he was standing and pulled a biscuit toward her with patient civility. Her fingers were dusty with baked-on flour as she waited for the gossip. 

Bones leaned back against the counter behind him, arms across his chest, and waited her out. They were idiots like that, having staring contests like children. Her eyes were blue (not like Jim’s) and her hair was pretty-and-blonde (falling all around her face) and she was slim and _strong_. But the sparkle in her eyes and the quirk at the edge of her smile was just-for-him, an infuriating twist of arrogance that left him with the quick-and-hot desire to slap the expression off her face. 

“I didn’t break up with Jim,” he said. “I was never dating Jim.”

Chapel nibbled off the top of the biscuit. “I know.”

“Then you’re the only one—I didn’t make out with Spock.” Chapel picked up the PADD and turned it on with a swipe of her finger before spinning it around so he could see the image on the front. Bones was in the picture (and there when it was taken) so there was no accounting for how he was even inclined to believe the headline beneath it. (The Doctor Finally Makes a Move.) It looked like they were kissing—freshly done or about to start—so he just sighed and rubbed at the hair at the nape of his neck. “I was telling him about Jim’s penis. We weren’t making out.”

Chapel laughed: bright and loud. “Of course you were. Well, he’ll need to know all about it. I’m sure he’ll get a chance to examine it up close and personal and he’ll report back to you where your findings were wrong.” Then she motioned to the seat across from her. “Come on, I went through all this effort to make these damn things. You’re going to eat a few of them.”

Bones sat, he picked up a biscuit and he thought about home—very far away from here— “I think I’m going to go home for a bit. I think I’d like to see Joanna before she gets too much bigger.”

“I think you should,” Chapel said. “Then you can come back here and take that position they offered you because I didn’t agree to stick with Jim because I suddenly like him better.” There was a pause there. “Besides, Spock’s waiting to see where you go. I heard,” and by that she meant ‘read’, “that he hasn’t agreed to a temporary position here because you haven’t. So, maybe tell them you’re going to stay.”

“Spock doesn’t care what I do.” Bones bit into the biscuit and spit it out all in one motion. The bitter taste of baking soda was filling up his mouth. Chapel pushed the jelly jar over toward him with a cringe of embarrassment (that she didn’t mean, since she had yet to actually even taste her own biscuit) and he pulled the lid off and used his finger to dig the jam out. It didn’t wash the taste out of his mouth (so to speak) but it made it more bearable. 

“No good?” she said.

Bones coughed to clear his throat and wiped his fingers on a spare towel laying on the table. “I’ve had better,” he said. 

Her smile was forgiving—and welcome, and wonderful.


	3. Chapter 3

The knocking on his door was an obnoxious backbeat to the dream that Bones was trying to hold onto. It was dragging him out of the deeper part of unconsciousness, beckoning him toward reality with a persistent but inconsistent noise. Like Jim’s alarm, it was _impossible_ to sleep through even before the shouting started.

“Look,” was loud enough to make it from the door of his room to his bed tucked in the back corner. “I know you’re angry at me.” 

Bones rolled onto his back and rubbed his face. 

“But this is childish.” Jim must have been embarrassed about shouting that through his doors because there was a softer thump like the fleshy part of his arm instead of the blunt bone of his fist. “Come on, Bones. Open the damn door.”

But it was quiet after the last demand and Bones laid still, holding his breath, waiting for Jim to give up and leave or just break into the room. Either way, he was not prepared to get out of his bed this close to going home to see his sister. A man needed all the sleep he could possibly get before he was sent to his slow-and-inevitable demise. It was a surprise to nobody (at all) when his door opened and Jim invited himself in; Bones was lazy and mostly-naked, on his bed with his blankets tangled around his hips, when Jim came around the corner to look at him.

“Mature,” James fucking T Kirk said to him like he had any right to lecture any man on his maturity.

“I knew you’d figure out how to get the door open without me.” Since he wasn’t waiting for an intruder anymore, Bones pulled his blankets up to his shoulders and rolled over. The bed was cool from being exposed to the air too long, but it was nice to sink back into it and warm up. He was set to snooze again but Jim sat on the end of the bed like a boulder, dragging the edge of the mattress down. 

“Are you coming back?” Jim asked. The words were so hollow and delicate, covered up in a rigid-insensitivity that made them seem callous. The sound of them grating against Bones’ nerve as he shifted so he could look down at Jim’s hunched shoulders and bowed head. 

“Of course I am.” 

Jim nodded. He sighed before he turned his head to look over his shoulder at Bones. “Good. I’m glad.” And then, with a smirk tugging at his lips, “are you going to date Spock when you get back?”

Bones kicked him off the bed to the chorus of Jim’s laughter and ignored him until he went quiet and still on the ground. When he looked, Jim was still pink from the effort and smiling up at him. 

“There’s always some kind of truth to those stories isn’t there?” was Jim and his sneaky fingers creeping under his blankets. He wasn’t smooth (anywhere, really) but deliberate with a fresh-licked grin on his face. “I mean, they figured out we were having sex.” Then it was Jim’s elbow on his bed, and his knee, as he slithered up like a snake. 

“Yes, well most of them have passed their vision test.” Bones brought his knee up and Jim reared back to avoid getting hit. His smile didn’t falter. “That doesn’t mean I want to date Spock.” He folded his arms behind his head while Jim invited himself closer, laying across the blanket in exactly the right way to cage Bones in place. 

“No,” he agreed, wearing his stupid kiss-face, that one he had when he thought he was going to get laid any second (but he wasn’t, at least, this time). “Maybe it means he wants to date you. He talks about you a lot, you know. Mostly complaining but—”

“You’re not getting sex,” Bones said. 

Jim collapsed on him with an exaggerated moan. “I’m not wrong about Spock, though,” was muffled into the blanket over his shoulder. 

\--

If there were any mercy in the universe, Bones would have been born with the ability to think before he opened his damn mouth. One minute he was just sitting on a bench waiting for the announcements to call him to his shuttle that would connect him to the earth-bound ship that would have him back in Georgia in two days (or less) but the next minute it was: 

“Spock,” when the man himself appeared next to him looking straight up and down with his arms behind his back, “I’m starting to think you are sweet on me.” It was the sort of commentary that made sense in the back of his head where he was nursing his indignation over Jim showing up in his room looking for ‘I’ll see you in three weeks’ sex overlapping with Chapel’s exhausted good humor at the gossip rag. It wasn’t the sort of thing that man said to anyone, especially not someone he didn’t actually want to have sex with.

“I am not familiar with the meaning of that phrase, Doctor,” Spock said. But the quirk of his eyebrows seemed to suggest otherwise. (Or else he was guessing and he wasn’t far off from the truth.) 

Bones got to his feet and shoved his hands into the pockets of his off-duty pants (he’d bought them at a shop close to his room when he got sick of wearing standard-issue clothes). His feet were rocking for him and that left him awkwardly standing close enough to smell Spock’s haircare products. “Of course not,” he agreed. But also, “did you need something?”

“I was under the impression that you were leaving to visit your family.” 

“I am.”

“Yet you do not have bags with you,” Spock did not motion at the empty bench but it was clearly exhibit number one. The concern seemed out of place considering Spock could not have known he didn’t have bags before he showed up at the shuttle bay to see him sitting alone on the bench. Still, Spock seemed to believe it was a perfectly good reason to show up and crowd close enough to him that some gossip-monger with a camera fetish was sure to be snapping photographs of them.

“I’m a little short on personal belongings at the moment,” he said. His fingernails scratched at the beard he was letting grow on his face. “I figure anything I need they probably have on the ship that’s taking me and anything I want I can buy at home.” If he were Jim (or anything at all like the gossip rag liked to say he was) he would have asked Spock why he was really there and if there was any truth to the rumors. But he was Bones and the quiet was discomforting while Spock just looked into the middle distance searching for something to say. “So,” came just before, “take care of Jim while I’m gone?”

“I believe the Captain is capable of caring for himself.” 

No he wasn’t. Bones nodded. 

“Even if he were not, I do not believe that I would be the best candidate.” 

They were only saved from limping through the remainder of the conversation but the interrupt of the announcements calling him to the shuttle. Bones clapped his hand against Spock’s arm (for lack of anything better to do) and nodded toward the shuttles. “That’s my ride,” seemed unnecessary. 

“Of course, Doctor.” There was no telling what made Spock’s face go blank like that. There was no telling why he seemed defeated. There was absolutely no explaining how Bones’ fingers went from limply cupped around Spock’s arm to gripping his bicep but Spock looked at him with a lifted eyebrow.

“You should take a break, while they’re still giving them away. If you don’t want to go see your Father, go somewhere. Come to Georgia, we’ll show you around. Don’t just stay here.” None of that (not a single word) was anything he thought that he’d meant to say. 

But Spock almost smiled. “Thank you, Doctor. I will take that under advisement.”

Bones nodded along and then he ran for his life.

\--

He had two very, very long days to contemplate how he’d gone off and invited Spock to Georgia without any understanding of:

a. Why he would do such a stupid thing.  
b. What he expected to do once Spock was there. or  
c. How he was going to explain it to his know-it-all sister

\--

Oh, but Georgia was a beauty of red clay and green leaves. It was the thickness of the humid air and the sweetness in the breeze, everything was still blooming up pretty at the tail end of the summer. He could have hired a ride to take him farther than the bus stop in town; he could have called his sister and let her know he’d made it home. But the sudden _solidity_ of the earth beneath his feet and the sky over his head gave his feet an itchy kind of wanderlust. 

He whistled his way home, lifting and dropping his feet along the same path he’d run time-and-time again when he was a boy. He reveled in the sweat that soaked through his shirt and symphony of birds-and-bugs hanging in the trees over his head. The puddles filling up alongside the road gave the impression of a recent rain but the thickness of the air reminded him of the short days before a long storm. 

It didn’t matter—not one bit—because he’d take hail and hurricanes just so long as he had the four walls and the roof of his Granny’s great sturdy house.

\--

Devon had been born four years before him and by her figuring (that was never quite as precise enough to get her top marks) that meant she was a good decade or two older, seeing how women were known to mature at a much more advanced rate. When they were two stupid kids fighting over small things, he was sure that she was the dumbest girl that had ever lived. When he was drunk on a bitter divorce, her arm around his shoulder felt as close to comfort as anything had since their Mama died. 

“Well look at you,” was his sister standing on the great big porch with her arm around a glass jar of tea. Her hair was swept away from her face save for the little hairs that she never could get to obey her—they had just started to go gray the way those little wrinkles next to her eyes had started to deepen. But her eyes were bright-and-young as she shook her head at him. Her bare feet barely made a noise across the wood planks. She made like there was no hurry to get around to the porch steps to see him. Her skirt swished like the lazy breeze, until all at once, she was ducking low to drop the jug on the porch. 

He stood still because she could slap him or hug him and there was no telling which way it was going to go just by the clench of her jaw. Her hands were work-worn and well-weathered sliding around his neck to pull him down. Her arms over his shoulders held him fast to the earth. 

“God damn it, biscuit,” she muttered. When she loosened up, her hands were spread across his cheeks and her face was pink-spotted with old worry. There was no telling how much she’d known or how little she’d been told. There was no pulling apart her worry and fear from the actual events. Her thumbs dug into the skin of his cheeks to pull his eyes all the way open and when he pushed her back, she shook her head. “Well, it looks like you’ve still got all your parts, anyway.” Then she went back up the steps and picked up the jug. 

“Where is everyone?” Bones asked. He left his shoes on the outside of the screen door, and almost groaned with relief at the coolness inside of the house. Devon was in the kitchen when he found her again, already tucking the tea jug inside of the fridge. “Where are the girls?”

“I sent them to spend a few days with their father,” which was no mean feat, “on account of how I thought if you were going through the trouble of coming all the way home, risking your life and all, that you might need an evening to get drunk and whine about things.” She washed her hands in the little sink by the stove and then dried them off on the apron hanging from the hook on the wall. When she turned around she was holding a clear jar full of clear liquor that she slapped on the counter in front of him. “So,” she said, “was I right?”

“I don’t whine.”

“Of course you don’t, biscuit. Now go take a shower, you stink. I’ll make us something to eat.”

\--

There wasn’t much of the old house that had changed since it was built (a few centuries ago, so said his Granny). The only updates it had sustained were the ones hidden in the walls. The wood and the metal were all the same now as they had been the first day his great granny moved in. He stood under the showerhead, with his hands on the faucet, willing the water not to come out like an ice shower (this time) and working up the personal resolve to withstand it without shrieking.

When he turned the taps on, the water gurgled and cranked through the house before spewing out of the showerhead in pellet-hard drops, as cold as space. It hit his skin like knives and he grit his teeth to keep from making a sound (because he knew Devon was in the kitchen, humming to herself and waiting for the screaming to start). 

The water was warm before he had time to start shivering; and he leaned his head against the shower wall to let it sluice down his back. There was a stillness in this shower that he’d taken advantage of when he was nothing but a stupid kid hiding from the world, and when he was a teenager trying to work out what to do with his life, and as a miserable grown up nursing a hangover from a terrible divorce. 

That stillness was a reprieve, now, and maybe he’d come all this fucking way just to feel a moment of peace.

“Fuck,” he mumbled into the steam of the ancient shower. 

\--

Dinner was gravy drizzled on leftovers eat at the same table they’d eaten as when they were kids. They drank tea out of thick clear glasses with their elbows off the table and their lips sealed shut while they chewed. 

The silence was a long pause, deep enough to sink into, comfortable enough to enjoy.

\--

Darkness blanketed the yard absolutely. The only light to be seen through the yawning sway of the old trees was the sprinkle of fireflies darting back and forth. The moon was a dim sliver, visible only if he stared over his head hard enough. The stars were pinpoints—too distant to be seen with any clarity. 

“I imagine it’s different from this side,” Devon said. She was wearing a sweater over her dress, carrying two plastic cups dangling from one fist while she held the mason jar of moonshine against her hip with the other. Her hair was hanging down around her face, a messy swirl of brown-and-blonde without committing to either. 

“The places I’ve been, they don’t even have names for the stars yet,” Bones said. He straightened up so he wasn’t leaning on the railing and turned around to look at her. The porch light was a dull yellow spot near the door, just enough they could see the old rocking chairs and the rickety little table by.

“I see you haven’t lost your flair for the dramatic.” Devon set the moonshine on the table and lit the candle that drove away the bugs. It smelled like every after-dark memory he had of childhood. “Daddy would be proud of you for it, anyway.” Then she sat in her seat (the one that Mama had always sat in) and she motioned him to the other (the one that Daddy had sat in) and she waited for him to take his place. 

Bones sat and he snorted at the notion of his father being proud of anything that he’d accomplished. (Maybe he would’ve been proud of Bones for being a good doctor, and maybe he could have been proud of him for having such a great kid. He might have been bursting at the seams over the notion of good genetics being passed along. But that didn’t seem like much.) “I don’t mean to brag but I did just save hundreds of lives.”

The moonshine poured like water—deceptive and clear—and Devon screwed the lid back on before she leaned into the recline of her rocking chair. “I’m sure you were up there in space counting all the ones you saved, because that seems like the sort of thing you would do. I bet your pockets are full of the names and faces of the survivors.” She tipped the glass against her lips and lifted her eyebrow as punctuation to the comment.

“Shut up.” He swallowed the moonshine as fast as he could (and regretted it). It burned like cold fire all the way down his throat but he was satisfied nonetheless. “There’s nothing wrong with my pockets.”

“Liar,” Devon said. She took a sip and refilled his cup. When his was set to overflow, she turned her seat so she could study him with those shrewd eyes that all McCoy women seemed to have. The ones that dared a man to try to sneak a lie past them. But the look softened, “fine. We’ll talk about something else.”

“Thank you.”

“Still dicking Jim?” 

Bones took another drink to that beautiful notion. “Well, as long as he decides he’s going to stick around, I guess I am.” He licked the taste of moonshine off his lips and sat back in the seat. “That little bastard was just going to leave—and I get it. You think my pockets are full of the dead, he had to stitch extenders into his pants just to carry around all his baggage.” He sighed. “He’s—he’s one of those people, and I love him. He’s my friend—but he’s one of those people who could have anything he wanted. Those people can’t appreciate what they’ve got; they don’t ever have to work for it so they don’t understand what accomplishment really is.”

Devon sipped her moonshine like fine wine with one arm on the table and toes pushing against the creaking porch to rock her. “You think Jim Kirk doesn’t appreciate what he’s got?”

“Who the fuck knows.”

“Do you think he appreciates you?” Devon asked.

“Ha.” No, Bones was easy—like a loyal damn dog. He wouldn’t go anywhere until they made him. He would follow Jim around long after it made sense to bother. Just six steps behind him on the right, always saying ‘damn it Jim’ and holding his breath in between one near-death and the next. The fear of dying in something that flies was a petty notion set on the shelf next to the exhilarating (and heart-stopping) fear of Jim failing. But it was stuck between his God-damn teeth until his jaw was aching because they kept pushing the odds the way he kept putting his faith into one fucking man. Jim Kirk was flesh-and-fucking-blood; he would _fail_ (sooner or later). “I think Jim can have anything he wants.”

“You said that,” Devon said. She set her cup down and hugged her sweater around her. “You know, you told me Joss could have anything she wanted. You said—‘Devon she’s the prettiest and the smartest girl in the whole damn world and she could have me or you or anyone she wants. So as long as she’s looking at me, I’m going to keep on looking back at her’.”

“Well I must have blinked,” Bones said. 

“Have you considered,” a pause, “the problem isn’t that they can have anything they want and you’re just a little bitty fly caught in the web, but that it’s _you_ that can have anyone they want?”

“That’s stupid.”

“It’s stupid?” Devon repeated.

“Yes. That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard—I’ve never gotten anyone that—”

Devon rolled her eyes. “You’re telling me that you, a simple country doctor from a no-name town in Georgia managed to sneak into the heart and panties of not only the prettiest and most promising girl this town has produced in fifty years, but also ended up balls-deep in a four year long fuck-friendship with the smartest and most promising and possibly youngest Captain in Starfleet history, who along with being a hero also happens to be disgustingly good looking? You’re telling me that you’ve spent the last seven or so years pissing Christine Chapel off to the point that she would rip your hair out one strand at a time but she still calls to get biscuit recipes when you’re sad—you’re telling me you’re number one on the Enterprise gossip rag’s whose-fucking-who intrigue column every single day but you don’t think you’ve got enough raw animal magnetism to carelessly attract whoever you want?” She stared at him a beat, “that’s what you’re trying to tell me?” 

“The only thing good looking about Jim is his mouth, when he’s not talking.” But he was liquid and smooth with good moonshine. Ignoring the way Devon hummed her disbelief at him. “Joss was pretty though, wasn’t she? God damn, Joss was pretty.”

“She still is pretty. Maybe you ought to tell her that when she shows up to drop your daughter off for a visit. It might save you a whipping when she finds out you came back without asking her permission first.” Then Devon picked up her own glass and tipped it up to take a long drink. 

“Nothing is going to save me from her.” Bones sighed and he slouched in the rocking chair and he watched the fireflies dancing in the yard. “A lot of people died, Devon. A lot of people that shouldn’t have had to die.”

“I know,” she whispered, “but you can’t carry them, biscuit. Nobody’s pockets are that big.”

\--

Bones spent a day in the hold hammock under the intertwined branches of the marrying tree. He slept in the soup-thick afternoon heat, content as he had ever been. 

\--

He woke up on the third (or maybe the fourth, it was so hard to tell when he had nowhere to go and nothing to do) day to the sound of hollering and carrying-on. It dragged him out of the dubious comfort of his childhood bed and down the creaking stairs to the front door that was flung wide open. Out in the yard, Susanna and Jenny screaming foul play at the other while their poor stupid fuck of a father stood like a man awaiting a court martial. 

Now, Bones had seen a hundred and seventeen _thousand_ photographs of his nieces but he’d been exiled from Georgia just the same as he’d been sent off the planet entirely. The last time he saw them up close and in person, they seemed to be half the size they were now. So he was padded out on to the old porch with his eyes narrowed against the sun, trying to figure out what they’d gone off and done. There were no missing pieces (as far as he could see) and both of them still had their hair (and it as long enough to make him believe they hadn’t cut it). He was working out how old they were (in his head, one of them must have been fifteen and that meant the other could’ve been thirteen but it was hard to know). It was unlikely (but not impossible) that they’d gone off and gotten pregnant but it seemed unlikely anyone would still be left alive on the front lawn if that were the case.

“Who’s that?” interrupted the fluctuating rise and fall of the argument. And the older girl threw her hand to the side like she’d discovered something amazing, “I can’t invite my friends over to a house that doesn’t even belong to you but you can just have whoever you want.”

Devon looked over at him with a perfect eye-roll. “Well, it’d be pretty rude to kick him out of the house he was born in, maybe.” Then she cut off the argument (point blank) with a shake of her head and the rise of one of her fingers. “You know you did wrong and no matter what you say that won’t change.” Then she motioned them both toward the house, “say hello to your Uncle Leonard, wash your faces and start your laundry.” But the way she rounded on her ex-husband was exactly the sort of thing that could be used in a court of law to convict a woman of premeditated murder. 

“Hello Uncle Leonard,” was pure venom pouring out of the mouth of a fifteen year old girl. The sort of thing that had made him hate Devon when they were kids. Susanna was her Mother’s clone, right down to the color of her eyes and the furious grit of her jaw.

But Jenny was all bones and dark hair, looking at him with a curious tilt of her head. “Uncle Leonard,” just sounded like she was _trying it out_ , “aren’t you the one that isn’t allowed in the state for fear of you getting your head taken off?” 

“We only have one uncle!”

“Well I know that!” Jenny screamed through the door, “but you know Mom calls any man that’s family our uncle!”

That brought Susanna back to the door with her fresh-washed-face full of contempt. “Well if you weren’t so stupid you’d know that he’s Joanna’s Dad. You can tell just by looking at him, they’ve got the same eyes. Now get in the house like your Mama told you, rat.” And she was gone again in a flurry of furious steps.

Jenny was grinding her teeth so hard it was making the air crackle with heat. She looked over her shoulder at where Devon was whispering threats at their Father. “I am not a rat,” she said. Then she grabbed the door and yanked it open. “You act like you’re so smart! You didn’t even know who he was!”

There was no way he was going back into a house full of screaming teenagers, so he took a seat in the old rocking chair and he resolved to wait it out. Devon came back after a minute, leaving her ex-husband running for his life. She paused at the top of the steps with her hand curled around the handrail. “You remember how Granny used to say, there’s no stopping kids from figuring out what their bodies are made for—and then she would always look at you and say, but all the same I just hope one of you turns out gay because I can’t raise any more kids.”

“How do you forget something like that?” Bones asked. “Which one of them is sneaking dates over?”

Devon rolled her eyes. “Probably both of them, only one’s better at keeping secrets. You should go into town today. This is going to take most of the day.” And she sent him off with a wave of her hand.

\--

Bones spent a day in town like risking his life.

He made it through breakfast, shopping for clothes, shopping for lost essentials (like the razor that was only worthwhile when sold at the shop on the corner) and meandering through looking at the knickknacks and antiques at an outdoor flea market without incident. The sky was gathering up to burst by late afternoon and he was all set to give up the search for something to replace all the useless junk Jim had lost when his luck ran out.

Jocelyn (his planet-stealing, vow-breaking ex) found him at the end of a long table of what purported itself to be antique books. Bones didn’t know one book from the other but he was fairly certain that anything made of real paper was old enough to be considered antique. His fingers had very nearly caressed the outside cover of one of the offerings when a shadow interrupted him. “And when,” Joss said before he could even fully comprehend the title of the book he was trying to pick up, “were you planning on letting me know you were back?”

Bones sighed. He had been born a stupid man, but nothing made him stupider than realizing how god-damn beautiful this woman was. Even when he wanted to hate her (and he did, often) he couldn’t muster up that kind of energy when he was looking at her. He had come of age falling in love with her, and he’d survived medical school sustained by that love, (and then she ripped his heart out, took his child and kicked him off the planet but that aside). “I was getting around to it.”

Jocelyn smiled but it didn’t make it to her eyes. “I can see that.” She looked down at the books, “now did you know that the Captain of the Enterprise is a bibliophile? That’s a fun word. It means a person who collects or has a great love of books. Now, Leonard, ask me how I know that.”

There was no way Bones was walking into that trap. He’d seen this movie before. Instead he picked the book up and blew the dust off the cover. She was smiling at his raised eyebrow and it was the most in-depth conversation they’d had since she told him she slept with the realtor and he said she should've gotten a discount on the house for the effort. 

Jocelyn hummed, “not that one.” She reached to the side and three books behind her to pick up one and slapped it into his hand over the other. “If you want to impress your new beau, you should get him a real antique. I always did appreciate the care you took in choosing gifts.” Then she sighed, “your _sister_ ,” (who had done nothing in the past ten years to endear herself to Jocelyn but lived in a constant state of aggravating her for the sake of it), “asked me to bring Joanna by tomorrow. It might have been nice to know you were taking up space in the spare room.”

“Let it go, Joss,” Leonard said. 

There was no forgiveness in her; there wasn’t any in him either. They’d wounded one another too expertly for that. Still, she softened up to say, “I didn’t tell Joanna about the incident. She hasn’t said anything to me about it. I’m not asking you to lie to her if she knows but don’t ask me to tell her all the times you almost die at the edge of the known universe. No kid needs that.”

Bones just nodded, “it’ll just be nice to see her.”

“I’m sure.” Then Jocelyn was gone in a quick-turn. 

Bones was left looking at the books in his hand, standing awkwardly next to the man that was selling them. “Uh, these,” he mumbled and offered them up for the pricing.

\--

Joanna arrived after breakfast, overburdened with bags. She ran through the front door, yanking hard against the doorway that dragged her back when the largest bag got stuck. “Dad!” she was screaming as soon as her feet hit the old wood floor. “Dad!” She growled her aggravation the way her Mother always had. He didn’t see her yanking the straps of her bags off but rounded the corner in time to see them hit the floor. “Dad!” she shouted again, full-volume as she ran down the hall. Her arms were skinny and upraised, her dark hair flying behind her as she jumped into him. 

The impact knocked him back a step but it was the reality of her that took his breath. She was squeezing his ribs so tight he couldn’t have managed a wheeze no matter what he did. He kissed the top of her head and she looked up at him with tears in her eyes. 

“Let Devon know I’ll be back in three days,” Joss said from the porch. 

Joanna was just clinging to him like her whole life depended on it and he was helpless in that embrace—suddenly reminded of the length-and-the-briefness of the disaster. It punched him in the gut then, past the horror of the loss of life, past the filtered gray grief of avoidance and coping (in equal measures), it was his _life_ that slapped him in the face. The nearness of the end of his life. The exhaustion of surviving. 

His arms wrapped around his daughter and something shifted in his chest so monumentally that it seemed he could not even _breath_.

“I wanted you to come home,” she whispered into his shoulder with her fly-away hair all in his face. “I wanted to hug you.”

God, and what a fucking waste of humanity he was, that in all this time he hadn’t spared more than a matter of seconds thinking about how nice it would be to see her. “I wanted to hug you too,” he said. It came out in tight sounds, wet and bloody through his throat. He kissed her head and she loosened her arms just enough to look up at him. 

“Mom never wants to talk about what happened,” she told him in the side hall of Granny’s old house, “but they always call her anyway. I hear her when she thinks she’s quiet. I pay attention to the news reports.”

“I wish you didn’t,” Bones said. “You don’t need all that worry.”

“You do,” she snapped back. And her hand motioned toward the kitchen. “Just because you and Mom can’t get along for five seconds doesn’t mean that _I_ don’t deserve complete access to my family! You’re my Father and I have every _right_ to know what’s happening to you at the edge of the known universe. The only one of you,” and she was shouting at him now, “that _understands_ ,” a touch of hysterical dampness itched into her voice, “is Aunt Devon! I didn’t _ask_ for you to _piss off Mom_ but you did or she did something to _you_ but I’m not a baby anymore and I don’t deserve to be lied to!”

“I’m sorry,” seemed like the only thing he could say.

“You should be,” was nothing but Jocelyn in miniature, arms crossed over her chest and hair falling down her back. “You could have died and you didn’t even call me.” They were interrupted by the approach of footsteps. Joanna wiped her eyes with her fingers and cleared her throat, “whatever, did I miss breakfast?”

“No,” Bones barely had the time to say. Then she was gone, picking up her bags and finding her way to the kitchen with the other girls.

\--

Bones was no genius. They had filled his head with delusions of greatness in medical school when he was the better of a mediocre lot (or so he liked to think) but time spent in the company of genuine geniuses had altered his perception of his own intelligence.

Spock was a genius.

Jim was a genius.

 _Scotty_ was even a genius.

Bones was nothing but the well-educated son of a doctor who excelled at reading books and figuring out medical puzzles. He wasn’t very good at working out the inner thoughts of girls (or women, or anyone) but he was decent enough at conflict resolution when his every fault had been neatly spelled out for him. 

He found Joanna at the square table in the old sewing room (not used for sewing anymore) with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and a spread of PADDs laid out across the table in front of her. She was reading one of them with her fist pressed into her cheek and her teeth over her lip. 

“I can’t change what happened with your Mother,” Bones said. He left out all the ugly bits about how it wasn’t even his doing. He hadn’t spread his legs for an ugly realtor that cheated them on the price of the house. (He set his standards much higher, of course, before he did any leg spreading of his own.) 

Joanna looked at him without moving her head, just the slide of her eyes over to assess him. She was a real McCoy woman, dressed up like her Mother. They were sneaky, those McCoy women. Full of ways to strip a man down to his bones and leave him confused about how he’d gotten there. But there was no venom in her when she finally sighed. “I know.” Then she dropped her fist away from her cheek and he took that as permission to sit down. 

“I’m sorry that I didn’t call you. I hope there isn’t a next time—”

“Statistically there shouldn’t have been a second or third time either,” Joanna said, “but after the incident with the Narada and then Khan and now this? I don’t think _hope_ is good enough.”

Bones snorted. “There’s nothing wrong with hope.” He motioned at the PADDs all over the table, “when did you get so interested in statistics?”

“I like science and math. I’m really good at it.” And if he were anything at all approaching a good parent he would have known that. “You were just as likely to be one of the people that died on the Enterprise as one of the ones that survived.” Those were the cold facts of the situation. “Mom would have told me if you died, but she wouldn’t have told me if you’d just been injured. The news didn’t care about anything other than the Yorktown was safe and Captain Kirk was a hero again.”

“They like that story,” Bones said.

“Well,” was nothing but matter-of-fact, “Captain Kirk is a hero.” Completely irrefutable. “But he’s not my father.”

Bones sighed again. “I’ll call you in the event of another catastrophe.”

“Good,” she said. Then she cleared her throat like the whole matter was resolved. “Now you’ve been gone for three years and you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. So I made lists of the things that we need to go over and,” she picked up another PADD, “a list of the things we need to do before you leave again. I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I’d want to do with you while you were here again and these are non-negotiable terms.”

\--

Jocelyn hated him because he was the _fun_ parent and that was a nice and tidy way of thinking of it (for her). Unburdened by the day-to-day care of his own child, he was free to take her to the carnival and the park and drive her four hours to another town to see a museum she knew her Mother would never take her to. He was able to call in a low-level favor to take her on shuttle rides (that he hated) that let her see the world as a brilliant blue marble and she adored every minute of it.

He was a champion of fun when Joanna was chatting at a Starfleet recruitment officer about what direction she would need to take in school to get into the Academy. He was the best father that ever lived over exotic milkshakes while he listened to Joanna tell him everything about the school project she did with the boy who had purple hair.

But Bones would have traded every minute of frivolity and aimless adventure just for the chance to argue with her about brushing her teeth every day and picking her dirty clothes off the floor before bed. He hadn’t been given a God-damn choice if he wanted to be the fun parent or the dutiful one and every minute that Jocelyn spent hating him was insult to the unfairness that took his child from him. 

“Hey,” she yawned from the passenger side of the vehicle. “Is Captain Kirk really as great as they say he is? I mean, is he really as smart?”

Bones smiled into the darkness of the road. “Yeah,” he said. “He is.”

Joanna was humming her way to sleep. “Mom thinks you’re in love with him.” She yawned again. “There was some picture in the news she found, you were smiling at him. She said that was your love smile.”

“I’m not in love with Jim Kirk.” Not that his daughter would believe it when nobody else did.

“I saw a picture of you smiling at Mr. Spock,” Joanna countered. “I know Vulcans don’t smile but I think he was smiling back.” And before Bones could set in on the denial about that, Joanna sat bolt upright, “look at the deer!” She pressed her face to the window to watch the deer by the side of the road meandering through the grass. 

\--

Fate, Bones discovered, hated him. 

Joanna explained to him, ‘you have to take me into town and buy me a dress because every spring we have a formal and all the girls go and buy new dresses. My friend, Adelaide took her Dad with her because she said he was very particular. He didn’t want her picking out the wrong color dress. I take Mom all the time but I haven’t taken you yet and you won’t be here next spring when I need you so we should just go ahead and go now.’

Bones was helpless against the logic—and against Devon smirking into her freshly buttered biscuits across the table. Jenny and Susanna (well recovered from their recent argument) jumped on the chance to go buy new dresses. While Bones was more than willing to buy dresses for all three of them, convincing Devon it was a worthwhile field trip took them over an hour.

Of course, his sister extracted a week’s worth of extra chores from her daughters as a price of going so clearly even Devon was more of a genius than him.

Now fate didn’t hate him because he ended up sitting outside the changing room at the dress shop because he’d had a Mother, a sister, a girlfriend and a wife so he’d done his fair share of bench-warming. It hated him because he was nursing through the idea that Spock was smiling at him in some photograph that Joanna had seen. He was trying to work out if that was real or the romantic fantasies of a ten year old girl while working through his denial of its theoretical existence. 

Fate hated him because they left the dress shop (six hours and three dresses later), picked up an easy dinner at the grocery store, drove half way home and found Spock in-the-flesh, walking along the long-long-lane that led to the house. Bones knew him the instant he came into view—by the combination of his hair and his posture.

“Oh shit,” he muttered as he pulled the car to a stop. 

“What?” was everyone else in the car casting glances around to figure out why they stopped. Everyone but Devon who was smiling behind the press of her fingers on her lips. She said, “I don’t think we can fit one more person in here, biscuit.” With a flutter of her hand, she shooed him out of the car. “Go on, keep him company while he walks. Tell him he can put his bag in the car.” 

“Who is it?” was Susanna (or Jenny). 

But Joanna was gasping, “that’s Mr. Spock!” with pure joy.

Bones didn’t kick open the door of the car but used civility he didn’t feel. He didn’t stomp or shout or throw a fit. Because Spock had turned to look at him and most certainly wasn’t smiling. No he was completely apathetic with one hand gripping a bag hanging at his side and the other just hanging loosely there at his side.

“Leonard,” Spock said. He glanced at the car full of females with gawking faces just waiting for some kind of reunion. “I apologize if my presence is unwelcome. I expressed my doubts as to the sincerity of your invitation and the Captain assured me that you would not have extended such an invitation if you did not desire me to accept it.”

Well Jim was an asshole. “No that’s fine, Spock,” Bones said. “Let’s put your bag in the car. We’ll have to walk the rest of the way there’s not enough room for another person.”

Spock, most notably, did not insist Bones get back in the car. When Bones put the bag in through the car window, Devon winked at him and every girl in the backseat was blowing fake kisses at him.

Fate hated him because Joanna was grinning like she’d been proven right by sheer divine coincidence. “We’ll meet you at the house,” he said, “And none of you better say anything.” 

“Not a thing, biscuit,” Devon agreed. “Take your time, it’ll be a few minutes before dinner’s ready anyway.” Then she drove around them with a flutter of her fingers and left them standing in awkward, humid, silence.

\--

“The heat is very different on Vulcan,” was how Spock started a conversation two minutes into walking down the lane. “The lack of humidity makes it quite pleasant in comparison.” There was sweat on his temples and his neck that must have aggravated his sense of perfect propriety. 

“Georgia is a damp hell hole,” Bones agreed. He pushed his fingers through his hair and felt it ruffle up and get stuck by the sweat. He hesitated a second before blurting out (in all one long rush), “my daughter’s visiting the house for another day so the guest room is full. I guess you could sleep in my room, I can sleep on the couch.”

“I did not mean to displace you from your own bed, Leonard.” Spock didn’t look like he regretted that outcome at all. Bones cocked up an eyebrow to express his doubt and a strange kind of softness mutated the apathy into something that was dangerously close to being _fond_. Spock said, “you should stay in your own bed.”

“You say that because you’ve never had to sleep on our couch. My Granny would rise out of her grave and chase me with a switch if she knew I let a guest sleep on that thing.”

“You misunderstand, Leonard. Neither of us will need to sleep on the couch.”

Bones was stupid and that’s why he said, “how do you figure that, Spock?”

“We will share your bed,” like it was the most plainly obvious thing in the world. “It provides the simplest and most optimal opportunity for comfort.” Spock said it all with no inflection in his voice, as if he weren’t aware a gossip-rag-editor was crying in rage somewhere in the galaxy.

Bones was caught between confusion and anger, and he settled somewhere in the center of the two. “I don’t know how you figure I’d be comfortable sharing my bed with _you_. Where I come from you don’t just invite yourself into another man’s bed without some kind of—” flirting, romance, seduction, yearning, “—preamble.”

“I apologize Doctor,” Spock said. (He wasn’t sorry at all.) “I believe I did misinterpret your meaning. If I make you uncomfortable I can stay at one of the available rooms in town.”

That would just make the whole thing worse. “No Spock,” he hissed. And they were stopped dead along the side of the road. His hand was squeezing Spock’s arm like he could strangle the whole damn situation. There was no explaining how putting Spock in a random room in town would light an eternal rumor fire that he didn’t have the time or energy to put out. There was no explaining why dread was boiling up a bit too hot in the bottom of his gut as he rolled his eyes, “you can stay in my bed.”

“Thank you, Leonard,” Spock said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i have started a request/prompt tumblr called '[tell card to write](tellcardtowrite.tumblr.com)' so feel free to send me prompts there.


	4. Chapter 4

They made it through dinner through the grace of Spock’s stiff-back strangeness. Joanna was casting glances at him like she wanted to bore a hole in his skull and suck out the secrets. (Her stare every bit as violent as his metaphor.) Devon was smug with smiles and general well-wishes asking meaningless questions about how Spock had come to be there. In response, she was overburdened with facts-and-statistics about the ease and comfort of Spock’s trip to Georgia.

After dinner, the older girls washed up the dishes and Joanna was sent to do the sweeping. Devon handed him two glasses of ice water and said, “get out, you know they’re dying to talk about you.”

Bones didn’t invite Spock out to the porch but cleared his throat, “come on, Spock,” like a command. “The men aren’t allowed in the kitchen after dinner.”

Spock seemed surprised (or intrigued, it was hard to read his eyebrows) but he followed after Bones easy enough. They were odd shapes bumping into one another through the doorway and out onto the porch. The late-summer evening was dimming in the sky as the sun grew heavy and fat toward the horizon. There weren’t any lightning bugs signaling their desire to mate yet, but plenty of buzzing bloodsuckers looking for a fresh meal. Bones handed Spock the ice water and motioned him to Mama’s old rocking chair. 

Then they sat in stone silence; broken only by the indistinct voices from inside the house.

“Is this customary for men in this region?” Spock asked after a while.

“I don’t know.” Bones took a sip of the water and then set the glass down again. It was sweating so much there was a puddle on the little table between them. He rubbed his palms against his pants and looked over his shoulder at the lacy curtains covering the window behind them. His daughter’s precious face was slapped-with-shock at getting caught and she ducked away so fast she knocked over something inside. Spock glanced back at the window while Bones sighed again. “It’s customary for my family, at least,” he said. “The McCoy men have always been outnumbered and outmatched by the McCoy women.” 

Spock did not appear to understand his meaning but he had the distinct look a man who was willing to leave it without explanation. So it was a shock, thirty-six silent seconds later, when he said, “in what manner are you outmatched?”

“In just about all of them that matter,” he said. He picked up his glass and took another drink. 

Spock narrowed his eyes at him and might have said something (perhaps made the implication that Bones was not that difficult to outmatch, really) but he was interrupted by the old screen door opening. Joanna hopped through it with her old porch broom. 

“Aunt Devon said I could sweep out here.” She smiled at both of them before she set into sweeping.

“Of course she did,” Bones said. He picked up his water, praying for moonshine and no matter how many sips he took of it, it never changed for him. 

Joanna swept the porch from one end to the other in record time and circled back around to stand in front of Spock, clutching the broom with both hands. “Mr. Spock,” she said (oh-so-very-sweetly), “would you like to go on a walk with my Dad and me? We were going to walk around the Pritcherds’ old duck lake.”

And, of course, Spock nodded because he was all logic and no instinct so he didn’t know he was waltzing them both into a rusty trap. 

\--

The Pritcherds’ old duck lake was a local hotspot for anyone who liked picnicking at their own peril and swimming in the dubiously clean water. The family that owned the land (and the lake) had been living in the same spot so long the duck lake (and the accompanying molding old buildings around it) was an annual field trip for the kids learning about old Georgia history. There was talk of how one or more of the Pritcherds forefathers had been in this very spot during the American Civil War and while Bones personally considered that a tall tale told by a snotty little Pritcherds boy, the legend stuck. 

“My teacher last year said that the old duck lake had its own unique ecosystem,” Joanna was saying. She was quite a sight with her rubber boots that went almost all the way up to her knobby knees and the ruffled edge of her skirt bouncing as she stomped through the soft mud near the edge. “There’s two types of toads that live here that don’t live anywhere else in the region and Mrs. Bonnie told us that it was because they were an invasive species a few hundred years ago,” she kept on rattling off facts about how the toads had almost destroyed the ecosystem before a sudden shift in the climate (or something) left the poor bastards stranded on the shore of this poor lake.

“I find that highly unlikely,” Spock said so close to his face that one might have mistaken it for a whisper. His hands were clasped behind his back as they stood there watching Joanna digging in the soft bank of the old duck lake. Her hair was honey blonde and hanging around her face, dragging in the mud until she finally managed to find a toad. It was frantic clasped in her fingers as she held it up.

“See,” she said. 

Spock did look at it with as much interest as he’d ever looked at any specimen. What was lacking was the follow up for obnoxious knowledge as he explained the species down to the smallest detail. “Fascinating,” he said.

Joanna just about burst from happiness. Then she turned and threw the poor little toad back into the shallow water by the shore. She cleaned her hands in the grass as best as anyone could be expected to and then hopped over to take his hand. “Anyway,” Joanna said, “the Pritcherds’ old duck lake is also just pretty,” she said. “There’s no sunsets around here as pretty as they are out on the lake in a canoe. You should see one before you go.”

Bones sighed and glanced over at Spock who had an eyebrow lifted in appreciation of that suggestion.

“Thank you,” he said. “I will take that under advisement.”

Joanna was so pleased by that success that she walked the rest of the tour in quiet, interrupted only by a new anecdote from her science teacher’s library of semi-respectable observations. 

\--

“I like Mr. Spock,” Joanna told him with her toothbrush hanging out of one corner of her mouth. He was sitting on the toilet waiting for her to finish the bedtime routine so he could escort her to her bed and make sure she stayed there. (Lest she fill Spock’s head with anymore nonsense romantic notions about canoeing on the old duck pond during sunset and taking naps in the old hammock.) Any further introspection was interrupted by her rinsing out her brush and wiping her hair away from her face. “I asked Aunt Devon once what Mom was like when she was younger and she told me that Mama used to play baseball and roll in the mud with all the boys and that was probably why you liked her so much. I figure,” she said with the wisdom of ten whole years of life, “that maybe you just get bored when people are too much like you. Spock is good.”

Bones handed her the hairbrush. “You’re getting ahead of yourself, Joanna. I’m not dating Spock or anyone.”

That made her roll her eyes. Then she started brushing her hair. “Well,” didn’t seem like it was giving up, “why did you fall in love with Mom?”

That was far too complicated a question for him to think up a good answer. It seemed like giving grenades to a child and trusting them not to blow themselves up. For reasons that eluded him (still), Joss was as bitter about the divorce as he was. 

“If you can remember, I guess,” Joanna prompted. “Is it hard to remember why you loved someone when you stop loving them?”

Bones sighed so hard it was like getting punched in the chest. “Sometimes,” was as honest as he could manage. “Nobody like your Mother. She was the captain of the baseball team and the best player on the team. Now most of the others didn’t like how bossy she was and how serious she was, but she got us to the championship ever year.” His daughter was looking at him with a disbelieving raise of her eyebrows and an eye roll that hadn’t quite been realized. “Now you asked, and I’m trying to answer you.”

“Your answer is that nobody liked Mom,” Joanna pointed out.

“No, my answer is that your Mom was smart, and fast, and didn’t let anyone push her around. I mean it helped that she was beautiful because teenage boys are blinded by pretty girls but I loved your Mother because she was—everything.”

That didn’t impress his daughter but it softened her disbelief a bit. “Well why did you stop loving her?”

Because she cheated on him and blamed him for it. “I think we were just kids when we decided to get married and when we grew up, we found out we wanted different things.” 

“Well,” Joanna said like that was insignificant. “I don’t want you to be lonely because I was reading articles about how space exploration—especially five year missions—are especially difficult. Psychologically, speaking,” she added. “It’s been ten years,” like that mattered, “its okay if you made a friend I think.”

Bones smiled. “Well thank you for the permission. But no more trying to set me up with Spock. I do just fine on my own.”

“Right,” Joanna said with a roll of her eyes. “That’s why Mom thinks you’re dating Captain Kirk and Aunt Devon figures you’ve just slept in everyone’s bed.” 

“To bed,” he said. There was no sense in arguing with a woman (even one this small) that had already decided they were right about something. He took the brush back from her and watched her braid her hair as she walked down the hallway toward her borrowed room. “Don’t be so worried about me. I can take care of myself.”

Joanna turned around in the doorway to look at him. “Well how am I supposed to know that when you don’t ever write me or call me?” And then she hugged him like it was the worst thing she could think of to do.

“I love you,” he whispered into her shower-damp hair. And she said it back against his chest where her cheek was pressed. “I’ll do better.” It seemed like such a small promise, like hardly enough to overcome the significance of the problem.

\--

Bones poured himself a drink in the kitchen and carried it to his father’s old chair in the sewing room. It was a ratty old rocker that squealed when it moved but the cushions were the most comfortable thing in his memory. He sank into it and sipped his drink and thought about the weight of his failures. 

\--

It was Devon (not Spock) that found him. She leaned against the doorway, shaking her head. “I sent your fella up to bed. I do not know much about Vulcans but he asked me at least one hundred questions about the local flora and fauna and a few things about general customs of the area.”

“Sounds about right.” Bones glass was empty (but his head wasn’t). He was feeling the particularly sore kind of lonesome that always worked out so well for Jim (looking for sex and drinks and reasons to giggle). When he heaved himself up out of the chair, the world inverted for a minute as the blood worked its way through his body. He didn’t stumble but the world seemed to shift around him. “He ask anything good?”

“Yes,” she said. “He asked what ‘sweet on me’ means.”

Bones rolled his eyes at that. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him the truth. Now, give me your glass and go to bed. I don’t care where you sleep but your daughter is going to need you tomorrow morning.” She plucked the glass out of his hand and sent him on his way. 

\--

Bones slept on the couch because it was easier for Joanna to find him. She woke up at three in the morning, full of nervous energy, and they sat on the old porch playing cards in the darkest part of the night just before the sun came up. And they walked into town with never-ending stories of when he was a boy and what she was going to do when she was bigger. 

They ate breakfast to a litany of new (old) knowledge she’d learned in school. 

“Well now,” was Jocelyn finding them, like two criminals at the scene of the crime, still sitting at the booth in the diner. She was dressed for work—looking sharp and dangerous (and beautiful)—but she didn’t start in with objections and complaints. “Can I sit?” seemed almost nice. 

“I couldn’t sleep,” Joanna said. “Dad said that he liked to take walks when he couldn’t sleep.”

“I remember that,” Jocelyn said. Her arm slid around Joanna with such familiar ease that it made the space between him and his daughter seem like a canyon. Then she smiled over at him. “Did you tell her how you almost walked all the way back to Georgia in med school? Your father hated med school. He didn’t sleep for five years, he said.”

“I thought you liked being a doctor,” Joanna said.

“I like being a doctor,” he agreed, “but I didn’t like all the classes at school. I finished them but I didn’t like them. Not at the time.” He finished up his coffee and sat back in his seat. “I meant to have her back at the house before you got there,” he said.

“I’m early. Devon told me you’d walked into town so I thought this is where you might be. We ate two of our anniversary dinners in this booth,” she said to Joanna. “Your Father never thought highly of romantic occasions. He liked to be comfortable and well-fed.” But the words were fond, “why don’t you go wash your face in the bathroom.”

Joanna sighed. “Ok,” she said. “No fighting while I’m gone.” She left with reluctant steps, dragging her feet behind her. When she was out of ear shot, ducking around the corner to the bathrooms, Jocelyn looked over at him.

“Your sister’s a bitch,” she said without prompting. “But it has come to my attention that she’s not entirely wrong all the time. I haven’t been fair with Joanna; I know she’s a bright kid—almost as smart as you were at her age. I know she pays attention and I know she’s desperate to know everything she can about you.” There was a but hovering somewhere between Jocelyn’s teeth, like she was just looking for another thing to take away from him. “I think you should call her more; if we set up some kind of schedule—something that she could look forward to, something we could all manage, I think it would be good for both of you.”

“You didn’t want me calling you,” Bones said.

“Well, it’s not me. Maybe I thought if you just stayed gone long enough, she’d stop caring. But I forgot your sister was the single most persistent and annoying woman in the entire state of Georgia so even I could convince you had no right to the planet, she always would have found a way to make sure your daughter knew where her family lived. I can’t separate Joanna from her family,” now that was Devon’s words coming out of Jocelyn’s mouth. But the softening around her mouth and the heaviness of her sigh was all his beautiful ex-wife. “I don’t think I should have tried. Damn it, Leonard. We fucked this up—don’t give me that look. I didn’t do this alone; I know I’m the villain in the stories you tell. I know you’ve got all the evidence on your side—but they weren’t there watching you forget me while we were sitting at the same damn dinner table.”

“I know,” was more than he’d ever admitted to before. 

Joss shook her head, all pink in the cheeks, and drew a wet breath through her nose. “Joanna wants to know you. To really know who you are. I think she should have that chance. So, we’ll both have to work at making sure she gets it.”

Bones nodded. That was all he managed before Joanna was back with a fresh-washed face and anxious tears catching at the edges of her eyes. He hugged her outside of the diner like they weren’t going to see each other (ever again) and she clung to him like he was dying. “Hey now,” he said to her, “it won’t be so long. I’ll be back and I’ll talk to you soon.”

But she cried when she left with her Mother and Bones walked home with his fists in his pockets and his feet kicking rocks—feeling miserable and alone and full of spite.

\--

Spock was still in his house when he got there; looking out of place but ordinary while sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch. He was reading a PADD with the distinct look of someone that had may have been caught gazing only a half breath sooner. The humidity was soaking into his hair and beading up on his skin. 

“Tell me, is it customary to walk everywhere?”

“I like walking.” He stomped up the steps and crossed the old porch to take a place in his rocker. There was a pitcher of water (devoid of ice, most likely melted) and two glasses sitting on the table between them. “It helps me clear my mind.”

“Interesting,” Spock said. “I do not recall you making a habit of walking on the Enterprise.”

That was laughable. “Interesting,” he intoned, “I don’t remember you caring much about what I did in my free time.” It was far meaner than he meant for it to sound but there was no taking it back once he had.

Spock raised his eyebrow; there was a half-second when it looked like he was going to open his mouth to make some kind of spectacular comeback. Before he could get even a sound out, Bones cut him off:

“I didn’t walk on the Enterprise. I don’t see the point in walking circles when there’s nothing to see. What am I supposed to look at on the Enterprise, oh there’s a door? There’s a control panel. Look at how the track lighting is especially blue today.”

Spock nodded (either to shut him up or as an agreement). “As a child, I enjoyed climbing.”

“Trees?”

“Rocks.”

Yes, that made sense. Bones sighed. “I climbed trees. I fell out of one too, broke my leg in three places.” It wasn’t a fond memory but the first in a long series of memories that had him all but convinced he was never going to be a doctor like his father. (Funny how that turned out.) “If you give me a minute to catch my breath, I’m sure I can find something to make you travelling this far worth the effort.”

“I believe your female relatives are placing wagers on which location you will suggest we go to. They seemed to believe there were only three possibilities.” Spock glanced back through the window behind them as if they would find the pretty faces of his female relatives pushed up against the panes. 

Well, that just meant that Bones had to do something entirely unexpected. “Have you seen the Atlantic ocean, Spock?”

That caused a moment’s pause, “I have not, Leonard,” seemed as confused as, “does it differ greatly in appearance from the Pacific ocean?” And while he might have meant that as a jest, it was spoken with utter sincerity.

“Let’s find out,” Bones said. 

\--

“Biscuit,” interrupted him while he was packing up what little amount of belongings he’d managed to amass while he was at his Granny’s old house. Devon was standing in the doorway with a towel thrown over her shoulder and her arms across her chest. “Not that I don’t understand why you’re leaving,” that was funny when he didn’t even know why he was leaving, “but I had hoped you would stay longer.”

Bones stopped shoving his clothes into the pack he’d brought and stood up straight. The misery of the day was hanging off his shoulders, breaking his back with stuff he didn’t want to sit around and have dissected. “I can’t,” he said.

“Back to space, then,” she said. “Back up there with James fucking Kirk and space ships and the black vacuum of space. What was it that you used to say about space?” But she just sighed before he could mount any sort of defense. “I guess there’s nothing that can be done for it. You don’t live here anymore. Granny tried to tell me but I just kept thinking you’d find your way back. Go on then, make a mess of this the way you made a mess of it last time.” And she waved her hand at him to shoo him out the window (behind him) or the door (past her).

“I’m not making a mess of anything,” Bones said. “There’s nothing to make a mess of—”

“I suppose you take all your barely tolerable competition to the beach where your Mama and Daddy had their honeymoon. You know they made me on that beach, so you better watch out for the magical glitter of that sand. God knows what kind of things you’re capable of doing with your luck.” Every word was bitter, all tight-skin over knuckles and bare white teeth.

“What the hell, Devon,” Bones demanded. “You too? I don’t got enough of it from _everyone_ on the god damn Enterprise _and_ my ex-wife and my _daughter_ and everyone I work with, I’ve got to hear it from you too? I don’t want to be _here_ that’s why I’m leaving. I don’t want to be _here_!” He pointed at the floor but he meant the ground beneath it, he meant the soggy air around them. He meant the table where he sat opposite his pretty-pretty ex-wife and his sweet-faced daughter (almost a full stranger after all these years) and the whole sum of the population that stared at him like they thought they remembered who he was.

He meant this place, the one he craved when he was lonesome in space, the one he dreamed about when he was scared of dying and the one that was _poison_ when he was there. The one where his Daddy and his Mommy and his Granny and his God-damned marriage all died. 

Devon sighed. “Well you’re stupid. You leave with him right now, it doesn’t matter if you want him or love him or even tolerate him because you’ll be sucking his dick before dawn tomorrow. You know it the same as I do.”

Bones sat on the end of his bed like collapsing. His hand ran across his face and then fell into his lap. There was no real defense against accusations that were more-than-likely true. “I’ll just take that chance,” he said instead.

So his sister sighed again. “Wait until morning, biscuit. I’ve got a few more days off work, we’ll go with you a day or two.”

The last thing he wanted was to be _here_ that much longer, but he gave with a loose sigh. “Fine.”

\--

The trouble with Bones wasn’t that his wife had cheated on him (because he should have seen that coming and he couldn’t even act like it wasn’t half his fault anyway) or that he was a vulture feeding off the sexual remains of broken relationships, but that he was easy. He was shamefully easy and that was how he’d ended up in bed with Jim who was voraciously easy. It was why Bones name was plastered all over every sex scandal in the Enterprise’s brief, tumultuous history. 

It was why Devon hid the liquor from him. 

It was why he didn’t even need alcohol to make poor choices and that was why he was leading Spock down the trail to the old duck lake after dinner. There were fireflies flashing their love songs to one another all around their feet and bugs and birds and creatures moaning after the break in the heat. The sun was setting and the fresh-boiled earth was hot under his feet but the air had lost its crispness.

Spock was walking after him, placid as still water, with his arms behind his back. He made no observations or suggestions. He asked no questions (beyond the first one, when Bones told him to follow, and that was only a simple, ‘where are we going, Leonard’).

“Help me move this,” he said when they found the old row boat the Pritcherds left out for aspiring lovers and their unfortunate dates. Spock was stronger than him and that made the task simultaneously more awkward and easier than he anticipated. Once the boat was half in the water and Bones’ feet were wet straight up to his ankles, he held it steady with both hands, “now get in.”

“I am not certain that I want to,” Spock said. But the protest was followed by compliance. Spock sat in the boat with his back as straight as a dagger and his hands pressed flat against his lap. Bones picked up the oar and pushed them out into the lazy drift of the lake. “What is the purpose of this, Leonard?”

“Well, most of what Joanna said is regurgitated shit that’s been told around these parts since my old Granny was a baby. But she’s not wrong about the sunsets here. I haven’t seen one since I left the first time.” He rowed them out to the center of the lake and secured the oars so they didn’t fall to the bottom. While the lake wasn’t deep, the water had a funny smell that took more showers than he was ready to take to wash off. Once they were set he turned to look toward the horizon. The sun was fat and low, close to crashing into the earth beneath it.

“I watched a sunset with Nyota once. While it is an aesthetically pleasing sight, I was not affected by the sight of it as she had hoped.” Spock shifted the way he was sitting—and when the boat rocked with the motion he held his hands out at the side as if he could steady it—enough to face the falling sun. His eyes were bright in that failing light, his face warped by the age of the memory. “Science cannot quantify beauty. While it can study what each species deems beautiful and divine the criteria that they use to assign such a label, there is no proof that beauty exists.”

Bones sighed. “That’s a load of bullshit, Spock.” He was leaning forward with his feet spread along the bottom of the boat and his elbows digging into his thighs. He watched the sun because he was _lonesome_ for some real sense of home. “Was Uhura beautiful to you?”

“I do not believe in abstract, indefinable qualities. Nyota and I were compatible in many ways and I was fond of her for many reasons. Her physical appearance was not numbered among those, except that it seemed we would be able to maintain a healthy sexual relationship.” The bastard was watching the sunset though, breathing even and sitting up straight as he watched the colors start to change in the sky. 

The problem wasn’t that Spock didn’t understand beauty but that he was digging his heels in to keep from admitting it. “Fond,” he repeated. “Well I can’t see why an Earth girl would want to give that up. We aim for ‘fondness’ in all our relationships.” He scoffed. “Fond.”

“My relationship with Nyota did not come to an end due to any lack of perceived or given affection. She understood my meaning.”

“No I understand your meaning. I’m _fond_ of Jim. That doesn’t mean I’d give him a radioactive tracking device.” But there was a tick at the edge of Spock’s mouth. “You love Jim,” wasn’t a question.

“I value Jim and our friendship.”

Bones laughed at that. “I think it stops being friendship when you’re willing to kill for them.” 

Spock considered that as he blinked at the sunset. “I am attempting to connect the leaps in your conversation, Leonard. I imagine that in your attempt to prove the existence or perception of beauty you are relying on the emotionality of love.” When Bones looked at him, Spock was staring at him. “I assure you that Jim is only a friend to me. I fully believe that you are capable of understanding the loyalty and fondness I feel for him.”

“There are no leaps in my conversation. There’s just the places where you’ve got your feet stuck in the mud and your head up your ass. You’re as Vulcan as it suits you—exactly how your Father raised you to be—but there’s enough human in you to know what beauty is.” Anger was growling into his words. “You’ve got enough human to miss your Mother long after she’s gone, to feel guilt at pursuing your own life when your whole species is endangered, to be lonely enough to come here and waste your time with me. You’re human enough to feel _rage_ , the ugly kind that’s so strong you can’t feel fear or think _logically_. So I do believe you’re full of shit, Spock. You’re human enough to see beauty when it’s in front of you. I don’t need science to prove it to me.”

“I do not want to be human,” Spock said.

“Tough shit,” Bones snapped back, “I didn’t want to divorce my wife but we don’t have a choice about it.”

For a moment, Spock seemed too offended to rebuttal. It might have only been a matter of seconds (ten, eleven) but it was a stretch of time so immense it seemed the sun fell and rose and fell again before Spock said, “you are purposefully obtuse.”

“Only when it suits me.” Then Bones motioned to the sunset. “Stop talking, watch.”

\--

The silence sustained them back to the shore. They were walking under the silver of the moon, kicking up little frogs and hopping bugs all the way home. It wasn’t until they were under the yellowing light of the front porch that Spock bothered to say, “if I were given to sentiment, I would agree that I am capable of seeing beauty when it is standing in front of me.” And there they were, Bones on the top step and Spock on the third step, looking right at one another. The pause was a drag, the way Spock glanced at him a purposefully lick of heat. It was interrupted by, “you are not incorrect in your observations. However, it is not my Father that prefers I follow in the Vulcan way but my own. I do not find enough comfort in abstracts to convince me it is preferable to fact.”

“That might just be the most human thing you’ve ever said,” Bones said. He strode inside before Spock could refute it. Devon was on the couch with a book, but she looked up when he came in. Bones pointed up the steps, “I’m going to sleep.” Like it was nothing and he wasn’t running from Spock and his dumb face and his eyes (dark and serious and _intent_ when they looked at him).

\--

Insanity was two teenagers awake before dawn, packed and ready to leave for an impromptu beach trip. Devon was shushing them with long hisses, not for the sake of those still sleeping (because there was none) but in an effort to keep all of Georgia to know where they were going. That kind of thinking was impervious to logic because: a. everyone in Georgia (or at least this part of it) probably already knew, and: b. there was no way anyone could have heard the girls whispering anyway.

Bones was gracious enough to sit in the back of the car, crammed against the door with the two teenagers and their couple of hundred pounds worth of necessary belongings. Spock was up front (just in front of him) enjoying the ample leg room and arm rests without a care in the world. And since Bones was crowded and uncomfortable and surly with a hurried breakfast in his belly, he did the only logical thing a man could: he slept.

\--

The beach was another world; a little bit of a foreign land in his own home state. The ocean was vast and endless, the sands were hot-and-dry, and the hotels were luxurious (and short on vacancies). Bones stood at the front desk, on the verge of begging for the universe to cut him some fucking slack, while the lady behind the counter offered him her customer service smile as she assured him there were only two available rooms. One of them was two doubles and one of them was a king. 

Devon was smirking so hard behind him it was amazing her face didn’t break. 

“Well I’m not sharing with you,” was Susanna. And, “well, you’re going to have to if you don’t want to sleep with Mom,” was Jenny. But it was Devon, “girls, you’ll sleep wherever there’s space for you to put your head and you’ll be happy about it.”

Bones could barely bring himself to look at Spock, “looks like we’re sharing.”

“I have already indicated I am not opposed to these sleeping arrangements,” Spock said. And just like that, they booked their rooms and sealed the inevitable headline. Spock was even gracious enough to pay for the room they were sharing and Bones couldn’t even be pleased about the saved money because he was too busy imagining what sort of photograph they would splash beneath the headline of the gossip rag.

\--

“It is not dissimilar to the Pacific Ocean,” Spock said. He was perched on a blanket with his legs crossed in front of him and his hands in his lap. It seemed to be as relaxed as he was capable of getting when he hadn’t been recently impaled. While the other beach-goers were enjoying the surf and the sand and the sun, Spock was perfect-posture watching, documenting everything he saw in his catalogue of a brain.

“You know.” Bones was laying down with a rolled up towel as a pillow and the gaudy pink parasol over his head to block the sun from his eyes. “I never went to a beach when I was at the academy. Jim kept trying to drag me but we never made it.”

Spock turned to look at him. “I find it hard to imagine that Jim was incapable of convincing you to do something. I remember a rumor at the Academy that Jim convinced you to create the serum that caused half the student body to sweat what I believed was described as ‘the unholy stench of death and rotting potatoes left in the sun on a hot day’.”

“Nobody ever proved that,” Bones countered. And it hadn’t even been Jim that convinced him to do it either. Bones had done that all on his own, when he was up to his eyeballs in bitterness and misery. It had made him laugh for six straight days as he watched the low-level chaos of students who could barely stand the smell of their own sweat. While he couldn’t admit to being the culprit behind the unfortunate odor, he was able to get on the team that made the counteragent and neutralized the smells. “And not everything I do is because of Jim.”

“Of course,” Spock agreed. “However, I imagine to the casual observer it is difficult to find the line where Jim’s influence ends and your motivation begins.” Rather than keep his head turned so far to the side, Spock shifted his body so he could look at him without so much effort. While it seemed perfectly innocent (apparently young Vulcans were also taught to look at someone when they spoke) the lingering drag of his eyes across Bones’ naked torso was decidedly indecent. “I admit, I sometimes cannot separate the two.”

“That’s a lot of words just to ask if I always do what Jim tells me,” Bones said.

“You are mistaken in my intention,” Spock said. “I mean to ask—”

Devon interrupted with the long swish of her beach skirt coming to a full stop next to his towel. She was wearing her wide-brimmed hat as she looked down at him, sweat crawling out of her hair and beading up across her collarbone. “Some little piss ant is down the beach flirting with my child. Now tell me, Biscuit, how do I break his femur and make it look like an accident.”

Bones craned his head to look down the beach at where the skinny boy with the frighteningly white skin was leaning close to Jenny as she laughed at him with no sense of fear or worry. Thin as the boy was, it seemed like it shouldn’t take too much effort. “That’s what you get for having pretty children, Devon. They attract dumb boys like flowers draw in bees.”

She rolled her eyes at that and pressed her balled up fist against her hip while she glared down the beach. “Boys that age only think with their dicks,” she said. Then she growled in frustration. “It’s time for lunch.”

“No it isn’t,” Bones objected, “we just got here.”

“It’s time for lunch.” Devon didn’t even wait for him to object twice but set about rounding up her children (distracting flowers that they were). When she was gone, Bones was sighing himself back into laying comfortably in the shade, set on ignoring her and her commands. 

But Spock was getting to his feet like he’d been ordered by divine power. 

“Spock,” Bones said. “As my Mama used to tell me, if you didn’t come out of her vagina, she isn’t your Mother and you don’t have to listen to her. Sit back down. It’s too early for lunch.”

Spock sat (reluctantly) and fidgeted with the blanket under his crossed legs. “That statement excludes the possibility of adoptions, or the existence of any manner of birth not closely related to humans.”

“Well, I don’t think she was too worried about those contingencies when she was telling me not to listen to my sister.”

“Why would your Mother tell you that?”

“Because Devon used to tell me to climb on the roof and jump off and I used to do it. She told me to eat worms once too and I did that.” Bones glanced over at Spock, to watch his face for any sign of emotion. Beyond a blank kind of confusion, there was nothing worthy of note. “She didn’t take kindly to having a baby interrupt her reign as queen of the household. She wasn’t always nice, but she’s a good sister. Just too bossy.”

“I do not understand, but I feel that it is not something that could be explain logically even if I were to attempt to understand.” That was a lot of words just for Spock to say he wasn’t going to ask any more questions. “However, she is returning, Leonard and I believe she expects we will go with her.”

“Biscuit!” proved Spock right. It was easier to comply than to fight, so Bones packed up their beach things and carried them all back to the hotel under the pretense of finding an early lunch.

\--

In the afternoon, Bones put his shirt back on and found a path to walk that ran parallel to the beach. He didn’t invite Spock and Spock didn’t invite himself (exactly) but they found themselves walking in the same direction at the same time nonetheless. 

“Your sister has called you ‘biscuit’ several times. Is there an explanation behind this name?” 

There wasn’t a good one. “When I was a kid, a little kid, my Mother and my Granny would make fresh made biscuits every morning. Fresh baked bites of heaven, really. Every day, they say, I would wake up crying for my biscuits and I would sit on the counter and eat them until I couldn’t eat anymore.” And on that note, “I was a fat baby, if that’s not obvious. I mean, they gave me biscuits as my birthday present one year and I look happy about it in all the photographs. So my Mama started calling me biscuit and then when she died, my sister did it.” He shrugged. 

“Does Jim have a nickname from you?” He said the word ‘nickname’ like it was offensive to his tongue, dripping with derision as it was.

“Pain in the ass,” Bones said without thinking about it. They’d come to a stop without realizing it, Bones hand across the old wood railing and Spock’s body turned to face his. Anyone passing by might have thought they were a real scandal—some stupid boy like him taking up with a real Vulcan. There was a highlight of green in Spock’s cheeks as he looked at him—something indefinable in the smoothness of his expression. “I don’t have a nickname for Jim. That might give him the mistaken impression that I like him.”

“Do you like him?” Spock asked (almost immediately, almost _embarrassingly_ immediate).

“He is my friend.”

Then, like he was mocking him, Spock said, “I believe it is no longer considered friendship once you have repeated sexual encounters with them spanning several years.”

“Jim doesn’t sleep in my bed,” Bones said. The bastard wouldn’t have stayed there to sleep even if he had been invited (or maybe he had been, once or twice, and he hadn’t taken up the offer). There was nothing else to say on that matter, so he stepped around Spock (blocking his path) and started walking again. “And I left Yorktown to get away from him, so if you just came here to talk about him, you wasted your time.” 

Spock did not sigh, but any other man might have. Rather, he caught up with Bones before the path curved to follow the beach. “I apologize, Leonard, if I have caused you emotional unease. That was not my intention.”

“Don’t worry about it, Spock.” Because he was here to get rid of his worries, not to heap them on. "Let's just walk."


	5. Chapter 5

Truth was, his Daddy had gone off and died of a broken heart. His Granny (God rest her) had slapped Bones silly with a wood spoon when Joss divorced him. She’d had violent tears on her face to match the pink pressure bruises on his arms. They were a pair of them, Bones and his Granny, crying at one another in the kitchen. 

But they sobered themselves up at the kitchen table with a jar of clear liquor between them and fat shot glasses melting cool condensation down the sides. Granny was studious and well-aged, sipping with refinement while she said, “I like to think, whatever they had—your Mama and my son—it was the kind of love that can abide nothing but the absolute. I like to think he tied his soul to hers.”

“You like to think it?” Bones asked.

Oh, Granny was weary in those late evenings. There was no rage left in the film of tears in her eyes or the graying of her cheeks. She said, “well what’s the alternative, hm?” But they didn’t talk about it; they didn’t _lay it out_. It was an unthinkable darkness. Granny looked at him over a shot glass and she said, “I don’t care what it takes to keep you going, boy. If you lay down and die in the dirt like your Daddy, I’ll never forgive you.”

Bones shrugged.

Granny said, “ _promise me_ ,” and he gave his word. He wouldn’t let Jocelyn kill him but he took up drinking as a full-time hobby.

\--

The night was warm and there was gritty sand between Bones’ toes. He was slouching in the chairs on the little balcony attached to their fancy hotel room. The sound of the water running in the shower was a calming white-noise at his back, rivaled only by the gentle shush of the waves rolling up on the sandy shore. He had a bottle of liquor (purchased from the hotel bar, for far more than it was worth) resting against his naked belly. 

Spock came out, after a while, wearing civilian clothes he made look like a uniform. He sat in the seat with the sloped back and seemed offended by the forced casual lean. In the moonlight, his hands were white as death. “I have been told the ocean is soothing.”

It may have been, the steady cadence of it dragging away all the things that Bones didn’t want to waste his time worrying over anymore. How simple it would have been to empty his pockets in the sand and let the tide wash it out. There would be nothing left to worry about: not Jim and the loneliness gritted behind his teeth, not the crew that had been sucked into the great black void of space, not the unknown future promising more of the same, not his sister’s biting-accusations (not so far from truth) and not that God-damn gossip magazine spreading rumors-and-lies about the space he kept between this man next to him. Bones might have mustered up believe in a real higher power if he thought any tide was strong enough to wash his head clean of those worries.

Oh, but he unhinged his jaw like a squeaky machine, letting out a sigh that rattled his damn _bones_. “Was that a question, Mr. Spock?”

“If you’d like.”

Bones looked away from the black tide in the distance to look at Spock. In the low light, his eyes were so dark they might as well have been black. His mouth was a grim seal. “My Mama and Daddy came here for their honeymoon. Daddy used to say he fell in love with her all over again by the ocean. They conceived my sister out there on that sand.”

Spock pulled an ugly face at that notion. “That seems unsanitary.”

That hit him low and he laughed loud-and-sharp. “Most sex is unsanitary.” He unscrewed the cap of the bottle and brought it up to his lips. The will to drink was a shivering cold in his belly but it felt like his limbs were aching for simple-contact. “I do prefer a bed to a sandy beach, I’ll give you that.”

“I cannot imagine the circumstances of discovering this preference were pleasant.” And Spock paused there before he continued (as if compelled against his will), “is the urge for sex so great in humans that you would ignore common sense and physical well-being to satiate the need?”

“It can be,” Bones said. “The right person, the right moment? Hell, Jim once convinced me to have sex against a table in the Academy med lab.” The outraged look on Spock’s face was priceless. “He’s got very convincing hands.” And tricky fingers, and conman palms slipping all over Bones’ love-starved skin. 

“While it does not surprise me Jim would care so little about his own life to take such a risk, I would have expected an medically-educated man such as yourself would be capable of the basic level of risk assessment to make a more responsible choice.” Spock was _outraged_ , all tight knuckles and offended eyebrows. 

“So you never had sex anywhere _adventurous_?” He meant ‘with Uhura’ but he didn’t say it. The intent was present in the silence that followed. For a moment, he was sure that Spock was going to keep his lips pressed together and refuse him an answer. It simply wouldn’t be proper (after all).

“I prefer comfort and safety.”

“Don’t date Jim then,” and Bones took another drink. It washed down his throat with the bitter aftertaste of imagining the two of them. What a perfect couple they’d be, psychotically in love with one another, overlooking rules and ethics in favor of preserving the other.

“Jim is my friend,” Spock said (like a philosopher), “when I thought that I had lost him, I felt a great rage. Nyota and I had many fights in the aftermath of my actions; I admit that even when I look back on them without the cloud of that rage I cannot draw any effective conclusion except the obvious one. While I hesitate to apply commonly misused words to the situation, I cannot deny that I feel love for Jim. I would kill to protect him. I would kill to avenge him though it goes against every lesson my Father ever offered.” 

Well wasn’t that great. “I get it Spock, he’s a great guy.”

“I assured Nyota that Jim posed no threat to her or our relationship. I believe that she accepted my belief in my reassurances but I do not believe that she believed me. Our intimacy was different afterward.”

Bones took a drink. “I wouldn’t believe you either. I’ve seen you stand next to him. You lean into the space around him like an iron filling being dragged along by a magnet. Jim’s got his own gravity, once you get caught in it? You can’t get free.”

“I do not want to have sex with Jim,” Spock said. He said those words like it was the most important think he’d ever said and he looked at Bones like searching for proof he’d made himself clear. “The respect and love I have for him has no carnal component.”

“Alright, Spock,” Bones said. “I think I should sleep.” He screwed the cap back on his liquor bottle and set it on the balcony at his feet. “I asked the desk for another set of blankets, they’re folded up on your side whenever you get around to heading to bed.”

“Thank you, Leonard,” Spock said. But he didn’t look at him or move to follow.

\--

Spock came to bed when Bones was halfway to sleep. He was whisper-quiet and board-stiff when he slid into bed. But he was hot as a baked stone, radiating warmth that soaked into Bones’ turned back. That sleepy heat dragged him down and he saw no reason to resist it.

\--

The morning rose with the unhappy realization that too many years of sleeping with Jim had given him an unrealistic expectation of cuddling. While he couldn’t swear he’d ever been an overly affectionate sleeper (with his wife), he found himself with his sweat-damp cheek resting against Spock’s chest like they were the sweetest of lovers. His hand was fisted up in the blankets with his knuckles leaving dents in Spock’s ribs.

“Fuck,” he mumbled even before he was awake enough to work out if Spock was awake or not.

“I am unable to deduce if you mean to proposition me with sex or if you are indicating your displeasure at our intimate positioning.” Spock was _offensively_ conscious. The rise and fall of the words displaying the utmost arrogance in every syllable. (And if Bones could be so bold, he sounded every so noticeably smug too.)

Disentangling himself meant acknowledging that he had a leg across Spock’s. When he moved away the air between them went cool and damp so there was no mistaking all the sweating he’d done. “Sometimes, fuck is just a word.” He flopped onto his back and rubbed his face with his flat of his palm. Considering the situation, there wasn’t much to make worse by saying the truth. “Sometimes, it’s just the only good response to an embarrassing situation.”

Spock sat up. His legs crossed in front of him and his hands rested on his thighs. He was looking sideways-and-down. There was no telling from the slant of his eyebrows if he were offended or intrigued, but the gathering pinch in his shoulders seemed to indicate displeasure. 

The silence dragged a half-breath too long to be comfortable so Bones excused himself from the bed with all the grace he could muster. “They said they’d have more rooms tonight, so we shouldn’t end up like this again,” he said to be _reassuring_ but damned if he didn’t feel like a heel watching the last hint of emotion drain out of Spock’s face. “Sorry,” he said with a motion at Spock’s whole body, “for—if I made you uncomfortable.”

“Humans are incredibly ignorant creatures,” was all that Spock said before he rose off the bed. He was gone in long-quick-steps, disappearing into the bathroom and leaving Bones standing between the scene of the crime and the only good escape route with no idea what just happened.

\--

It took less than ten seconds for Devon to make note of the difference in Spock's demeanor (which was quite a feat considering how long Bones had known him and how he only knew there was a change because he caused it) but the whole of breakfast for her to get around to saying something about it. She waited until Spock excused himself to make some 'scientific observations' of the beach to prevent the whole trip from being 'entirely frivilous'. Then she slapped him on the arm hard enough it was heard in a three table radius all around us. 

"What did you do," was a hiss at his ear.

"I didn't do anything." Bones wiped his face with the napkin and dropped it on his plate. "Wasn't that the reason I had to wait for you to come with me?"

"I didn’t want you to jump him while you were emotionally vulnerable,” seemed like exactly what he said, “not do whatever,” she motioned at Spock’s departing back, “whatever you _did_ do." Then she straightened up. Her head was slow-shaking back and forth. Then she kicked her chair back and spoke loud-and-clear to her daughters, "come on girls. If you want to get back on the beach before we leave we should go now."

Bones was alone with a dozen curious eyes and two dozen curious ears all paying acute attention to him. For one moment, he was mustering up the will to defend himself from baseless accusations and in the next, he didn't see any reason in bothering.

\--

Out on the beach, Spock was making no noticeable scientific observations. Rather than taking readings and measurements, he seemed to be sitting stock-still and upright, looking straight ahead. He was an anomaly dress in all black, a bleak dot on the perfect landscape of tourists and happy beach-goers. It seemed (from a distance) that it would be just as simple to walk away and leave him to whatever Vulcan contemplation he was in the middle of. (Easier for _him_ , definitely.)

Still, Bones found himself kicking up sand right up to Spock's side. He stood there with his fists shoved into his pants pockets and his eyes squinted against the glare of the sun across the water. "I'm an idiot."

Spock seemed to breath a single breath of agreement.

So it was him with his hand cupping the back of his neck, looking around for any kind of conclusion and getting nothing for his efforts but a lot of sunlight caught in his eyes. Spock was _silent_ and _still_ in the wake of Bones' half-assed apology. It served him right too. Joss used to say it drove her _insane_ how he'd end up apologizing without ever knowing what he'd done wrong in the first place. "Look," he added, "maybe this is one of those—" there was no possible good end to the sentence, but he'd already started so why not go with: "culture things, you know?"

At that, Spock turned his head like an owl, all stock-still and unmoving save for the twist of his neck and the tilt of his face. He didn't have round eyes but he had a shrewdly displeased face. For a moment, it seemed that whatever he was working through conveying was impossible to put into common words, and when his jaw did unhinge he said: "Perhaps it is."

Bones groaned at that, like a deflated growl, as he lowered himself to the sand at Spock's side. "Well, I mean," he said with his elbows across his knees and the blinding glint of the sunlight smacking him in the face, "I just got drunk when my wife left me. I got drunk when my Granny died. I—I mean. I never even had another version of myself. And there's enough god damn humans infesting the universe that I never have to worry the species might not make it." When he glanced at Spock the words seemed to be making him less responsive instead of more. So he lifted his hand and motioned it around in the air, "I mean, I've never had to cope with the kind of things you have."

"I suppose you have not," Spock conceded.

"But I know what it's like to have the rug pulled out from under you. I know what it's like to lose someone that you thought you were going to grow old with—no matter the cause—and how it feels to know they're still out there but all your dreams of them are gone." His feet sank in the hot sand as Spock's narrowed eyes relaxed out of the furious tightness they had maintained. 

Spock-was-thinking, was smooth-faced and peaceful. "I find that," a pause, "my _expectations_ " which were much more scientific than _dreams_ , "have changed. Prior to making a final choice on the matter, I had attempted to identify the key moment that shifted my relationship with Nyota out of acceptable alignment." Spock paused again and _flinched_ at the very memory. It was a small twitch in his eyebrows but it was as much as a scream to someone that knew him well enough. "I have found several likely causes but I cannot say which is conclusively to blame."

"It’s not one moment," Bones said. He looked out at the ocean and thought of the slow deterioration of his marriage. All those small moments, and all those unimportant choices he'd made that had torn holes in the fabric that held them together. He thought of a thousand things (again, and again and again) that had been no bigger than pinpricks and paper cuts at the time. But those little wounds had turned to gangrene in the end. "Hell, Spock," Bones said. "Sometimes it just doesn't work out. Sometimes it just can't." 

"I find that answer to be unacceptable."

Bones looked at him, felt the stupid smile on his face. "So does every man that got his heart broken." 

They sat there, in the direct burn of the sunlight, with Bones' ass going numb in the sand and his head spinning with a hundred unpleasant things. He was working his way around to suggesting they adjourn to a different location (really trying to think of anything that wouldn't sound like a pick-up line or an excuse) when he was interrupted by:

"I do not enjoy the beach," from Spock, like a prompt.

Bones laughed. "Neither do I." And they picked themselves up to escape from the sandy hell.

\--

Spock was gray in the aquarium, standing beneath the wavering blue water. He was watching the fish over his head with his hands behind his back and his face as close to wonder as Bones had ever seen. They'd wandered down the boardwalk and into a tourist display offering interesting options for the day. 

One way or another they'd ended up _here_ , around a corner in the aquarium, shoulders touching as they watched the flex of the swift-swimming fish over their heads. 

"Why don't you love Jim?" Spock asked like the sturgeon over his head had whispered the question in his ear. When he looked down, the watery cast of blue made his face _ghastly_. "Romantically, of course."

Oh yes, of course. "I hadn't thought about it, Spock. I like the guy and the sex is good but he doesn't sleep in my bed."

Spock was dissatisfied with that answer.

"Why don't you?" 

That made Spock look back up at the fish. Sure as anything Bones had ever known (in his bones, so to speak), he knew that Spock was running fancy calculations in his skull to justify the answer. 

"I mean, old you seemed like he loved Jim." That didn't seem like a big enough word for it—not the way he'd had the story related to him (by Jim, full of horror and desperate loneliness in those first slow days after the Narada). Not the way the man himself had looked at Jim (this Jim, not his Jim) with such terrible _longing_. It had seemed like the most unfair thing in the whole of the fucking universe, to know this man from another time had been shown the love of his life had had it denied him (again). 

Spock's eyebrow lifted. "I believe he did as well." Then he cleared his throat, "however, I have seen pictures of Jim from his timeline and they are not entirely identical." Whether that was meant to favor or work against their Jim was left to the imagination. "Jim is uncomfortably creative. He appears, by with-holding the exact logic by which he arrives at the conclusions that account for his actions, to be impulsive and unpredictable. I appreciate the quality in his leadership. I see the merit in it in many ways,” Spock looked at him when he said that. As if he were the snotty brat calling Jim a cheater back when they were only strangers. As if the very fact he was admitting that admiration was an offense to him, “he has been successful through determination, courage and cleverness. I can respect these things about Jim as a friend and as a subordinate but, I cannot overlook the fault in a romantic partner." 

"Well, gee,” seemed like the only follow up that could possibly do Spock’s speech justice. “Remind me not to ask what you think about me.” He smirked when he said it with a nervous lilt in his voice (embarrassing as it was) but the lack of a mirror response in Spock’s face left him feeling like a heel.

"Also,” was so flat toned it was lying on the floor, “I do not believe we would be sexually compatible."

There was no arguing that. Bones cleared his throat and then looked down the hall toward the light at the end. "There's probably a café or something. We could get something to eat." Rather than try to argue the point, Spock just nodded.

\--

They dragged themselves back at the end of the day—long after dinner was over—and found the hotel rooms as full as the night before. Bones didn't even have the energy (after the aquarium, after a 'short hike' of a few dozen kilometers through uneven terrain, after a impromptu meeting and debate with other boring science minded people, after getting lost on the way back, after everything) to even care. He bought a sandwich at the deli by the hotel and he sat his ass in the chair on the balcony and he resolved to make the best of everything.

Spock meditated and ate and did whatever he did. When he was finished, he found his way out to the balcony. "I did not expect—perhaps I could not have predicted—that my relationship with Nyota would end. I did not allow for that variable in my calculations."

"Vulcans don't divorce?" Bones asked.

"Vulcans do not chose their life partners, typically. They do not marry for love but for mutual benefit." Which sounded like a great time for everyone involved.

Bones nodded because there was nothing to say. "Well, could have been worse. You could have found her in bed with the realtor." But it was a poor attempt at comedy. Spock nodded like faking a smile nonetheless. "I'm not sure I'm ready to go back."

"But we must," Spock countered.

"But we must." He took a drink to that, and another.

\--

It was long after midnight, when the sky was dark and the boardwalk lights were dim. Bones was wrapped up in a paper-thin blanket wearing nothing but a pair of sleeping pants with the price tag still on them, staring out at the ocean. It came after him all at once, the immenseness of survival—

The uncertainty of the chaos,  
The sound of Jim’s voice lost in the rubble,  
The green stain of Spock’s blood,

—And he thought of Chapel in the aftermath with her fingers spread and her hands shaking. The slow, pitiful drag of time as it held them fast in that moment: all at once stuck reliving the horror of their survival. 

It took him down, as sure as the waves on the shore; it dragged him into the bitterest part. There was no fire (no fury, no beating heart, no will to live) in that bitter black nothing. It was only compassionless cold and he felt it filling him from the toes to the eyebrows like water rushing all around him.

He thought of his Mama, pretty as a spring flower, lying cold and dead. He thought of his Daddy all long-and-lean, sipping his liquor out of the bottle with tears filling up his eyelashes. He thought of his stupid father saying, ‘son, there ain’t nothing wrong with a drink when you’re down’. He was a stupid kid, barely old enough to know anything about life or death but his Daddy gave him a drink of the liquor that burned his whole body like fire and they were survivors together, sitting on the sidelines with their bellies full of liquid fire, watching the women folk cry.

\--

“Fuck it, Bones,” was Jim’s voice (half-asleep, all gravel and crusty eye-lashes) when he answered the call. It was easy to imagine what he looked like, belly-down on the bed in his underwear, the blankets pulled up off his stupid feet but tucked in tight all the way up to his ears. He was violently cuddling a pillow by the sounds of it, running laps in his dreams. “What time is it in Georgia?”

“Four thirty in the morning,” Bones said. He was watching the ocean licking the sand, thinking there was no way out of the disaster. “What time is it there?”

“Uh,” Jim knocked something over and groaned and mumbled, “it’s two thirty, what the hell are you doing at four thirty in the morning?” His voice was a stupid child’s long whine, muffled by the way he rubbed his face with his hand in the morning, “isn’t Spock there?”

“We shouldn’t have survived,” Bones said.

“No,” was a breath. The way Jim’s hand slapped against his body in defeat. “No, we shouldn’t have.” But he was awake then, “I got the official counts. I had to send the letters. There’s one not too far away from you, you know.”

“Yeah,” because he did know. He had been that kid’s doctor; he had sat with him in the mess hall talking about good old Georgia clay. They had six arguments on the matter of the best peach-based dessert. He knew the kid by name and face and rank and medical file. But Bones was alive (not so far from where that boy’s parents were) leaning forward in his seat with his elbows digging into his knees. 

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” Jim asked.

“Why’d you send Spock here?” That wasn’t what he meant to ask. But it was safe to ask, here, so far away from Jim he couldn’t even imagine the look on his face. It was easy to ask when he didn’t have to figure out his expression but just if he was lying by the sound of his voice. 

“I believe the headlines.” Every word was quiet and safe (each of them alone in the dark). 

There was no way to respond to the stupidity of that statement. There was no absolute denial he could dredge out of the base of his gut. Just enough doubt knocking around the center of his body he couldn’t unclench his jaw to refute the statement. They were just breathing on either end of the call.

Sooner (or later), Jim sat up with a grunt of effort. “Look,” seemed like the sort of thing that Bones ought to have been saying. “You’re stubborn. I don’t even know why you decided that you don’t love or want to fuck Spock, but you did about three years ago.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“You let me give you a hickey five months ago. Bones—everyone on the Enterprise saw that hickey. It had its own column in the gossip rag for a month. They had an ongoing anonymous poll rating Spock’s level of stress because of it.” Jim sighed. 

“Five months is not three years.”

“No. But three years ago, you said, ‘Why would any decent human ever involve themselves with a Vulcan’ while you stared Uhura down across that birthday party—you remember that party?” Yes, Bones remembered the party, “and then you—”

“I know what I did, Jim.”

“—had sex with that Gregory guy in the closet. Do you remember the Gregory guy?”

Yes he remembered the Gregory guy.

“He was Spock without pointed ears. I could keep going. The empirical facts speak for themselves. He taunts you about logic, you taunt him about human emotion. He invites you on dangerous away missions, you bitch at him the whole time about how it’s so convenient he knows everything. Then you when you finally know something he doesn’t, you get the same look on your face about it that you get when you’re about to ask me for a blow job. I know the face, Bones. I’ve seen the face a lot. For that matter—”

Bones huffed. “Well this has been enlightening. I’ll be sure to tell Chapel that I found out the secret author of her favorite articles.”

“Chapel is the one writing them, I think.”

“None of that proves your theory.”

Jim scoffed. “It proves both my theories. You’re stubborn; you’re emotionally and sexually turned-on by Spock and I can’t explain that but it’s true. I’ve seen it. Spock’s seen it. Uhura saw it. The entire Starfleet Federation has seen it.”

Bones sat back in the chair. “So why don’t I love you?”

Jim was quiet a minute, like he’d been working that one over in his head for a while with no resolution. “Spock’s domesticated. I won’t ever sleep in your bed, Bones.” Then, like some timer had gone off and the conversation had to end, Jim was loud-and-in charge, using his Captain’s voice saying, “take an extra week, Bones. Show Spock around Georgia.”

\--

Morning was a sober affair, quietly creeping up on the night before. Bones never made it to bed but sat with his blanket and his naked arms. Spock came out before dawn and sat (fully dressed) in the chair not so far away from him. 

“My Daddy used to tell me, ‘son, you don’t have any say in who you’re going to love. That’s the thing about it, you don’t get to pick, it just sweeps you up and takes you. You can go along with it or you can fight it, but love’s going to do whatever it wants all the same’.” Bones smiled at the waves across the sand. He was _exhausted_. Spock was watching him without judgement, studious and quiet and alert. “I loved my wife. I loved her as long as I could, and I don’t remember when I stopped but I must have because she said I did.”

“Vulcan courtships are practical. We strive for harmony and compatibility; our concerns are for successful children.” Spock paused a moment. “I confess that I was unaware I was being pursued by Nyota until she announced her intentions to me.” For a fleeting moment it seemed almost as if he would smile. “I remember she expressed her desire to form a romantic bond with me. She outlined her reasons that we would be a successful match and indicated her desire to address any concerns I had. She added that she was not immediately interested in conceiving or raising children.”

“Was that important?” Bones asked.

“It is not personally important.” Spock made it sound like a defeat. “Is the possibility of fathering more children an important factor for you?”

He didn’t mean to laugh but it tickled its way out of his gut like bubbles in soda. There was fondness in the stupid rosy warmth of his cheeks when he cut himself off, “if it were I’d be doing a terrible job picking sex partners.”

“It is not unlikely you to be contrary.” That was a sore point, as obvious as any wound. Spock looked away from him to squint at the sun reflecting off the water. “I heard your call to Jim. It was unintentional. I have not been able to reason if you wished the conversation to be private or if you were purposefully near and spoke at a loud volume to be heard.”

“What conclusion did you reach?”

“I did not,” Spock admitted.

Bones snorted. “I couldn’t even tell you myself.” He looked sideways at Spock, watched how unsteady he seemed in the moment. He tried to talk himself out of saying anything stupid (as he often did) but he was imagining the way Spock’s lips curled up into a smile back at that cave. He was thinking of how long his eyes lingered when he looked at Bones. He was thinking about the arguments that stretched one day to the next like the most athletic sex he’d ever had—certainly the sweatiest endeavor he’d undertaken with his clothes on. “So, do you believe the headlines?”

“A fact is only true so long as all parts of the fact are true,” Spock said. Six seconds of silence stretched like a fraying string before he added, “I am interested in exploring the possibility of a romantic and sexual relationship with you, Leonard McCoy. I acknowledge the timing is inconvenient and that your concerns about my appreciation of Jim are not unfounded.”

Bones licked his lips and tucked the blanket a little tighter around his body. Then he sighed, “how do you feel about cuddling?”

Spock’s eyebrows seemed offended by the question.

“I haven’t slept. I’m exhausted. You’re exhausted. I wouldn’t even trust my judgement now and I’m a human doctor used to making decisions with no sleep—you’re a Vulcan, you should be horrified by sleep-induced sappiness.” Bones put his hand out to stall any of Spock’s objections. “I’m not saying you’re not sincere. I’m saying I’m tired and I want to sleep and I don’t want you out there arguing with local ‘specialists’ about the evolution of crickets.”

“Leonard,” was impatient with him.

“So, unless you’re opposed to cuddling, I say we go back to bed. We can talk about it when we wake up.” 

Spock didn’t like it. There was no part of him from his uneven, unbrushed hair to his furrowed eyebrows to his slanting-frown that liked it. His boxy shoulders and his impatient fingers didn’t like it. His feet were flat-to-the-floor with disapproval but he said, “that is agreeable,” all the same.

“Good,” Bones said. “But don’t tell Jim. There’s no reason to let him go thinking he’s right about anything.” He picked himself up (feeling like dragging bricks across sand) and motioned Spock after him. They were odd-sided strangers in the room, each of them aware of the other in a new light. There was nothing graceful about their attempts to get into bed, or easy or comfortable about laying down.

They were prickly and stiff, staring up at the ceiling in the well-lit-quiet of the room.

“I like you too, Spock,” he said when the silence was too loud to ignore. It wasn’t a relief, but a timid-and-terrifying secret. He yawned right after he said it and rolled up onto his side with Spock pressed all against his back. It came by degrees, the way Spock’s body relaxed. Bones fell asleep wondering what his face must have looked like.


	6. Chapter 6

Bones wasn’t entirely sure how he ended up hiding in the bathroom the morning after he’d gone off and accidentally announced that he liked Spock. It seemed as juvenile and fitting as saying something as stupid as ‘I like you too, Spock’ had (in retrospect). He was half confused to be looking at his face in the mirror finding a full grown man instead of an embarrassing teenager with his face pitted with acne.

There was simply no telling why he brushed his hair and his teeth and stood there in front of the mirror assessing whether or not he was at optimal weight or if he could lose or gain a few pounds. (He was caught between feeling ridiculous and writing the whole thing up and submitting it to the gossip rag under a false name. “Moron Adult Doctor Acts like Lust-Stricken Teenager: the shocking true story.”) It felt like hours but it was probably closer to minutes before he came back out of the bathroom that he’d snuck into (while Spock was still sleeping peacefully). He had hoped to sneak back into bed with nobody the wiser but Spock was sitting up on the side of the bed with his hair sticking up here-and-there looking dissatisfied with life. 

Spock saw him and his eyebrows wrinkled up in confusion as he tipped his head. “I do not understand the human preoccupation with false pretenses.” It seemed like an echo of a conversation they’d never had.

“All animals preen.”

That made Spock turn so one of his legs was over the foot of the bed and one over the side. His clothes were pulled askew by sleep. “Your counter to this misleading and unnecessary display is to imply that you are the same as an animal?”

“My counter is that all sexually reproducing species rely on looking attractive to mate.”

There was a look Bones couldn’t swear he’d ever taken the time to appreciate on Spock’s face. It wasn’t that he had never seen it, because he’d seen the way his face loosened out of confusion and settled into something more like arrogance. It was a slow-burning kind of look, the most intense in his eyes as they looked at him. His mouth underplayed the obviousness of the stare, offering no indication about how he felt. But Spock’s fingers were digging into the meat of his own thighs as he looked at Bones with naked-and-unadulterated lust. “That indicates you wish to mate with me.”

There were only two possible reactions to such a statement: denial (which he’d excelled at for these many years) and acknowledgement. “It seems to.”

Spock was standing then, suddenly in Bones’ space. They were close enough in height that he’d never bothered to notice or care how he tipped his head to look at Spock’s face. But he’d always noticed the heat of his body, radiating like a furnace. That warmth soaked into his own skin, marinating him with the electric _possibility_ of _more_. Spock’s head was tipped and they were swapping breaths as he stared back at him. “I assure you,” Spock said (low and _filthy_ ), “I find you attractive regardless of the state of your hair.” And it seemed like he was going to kiss him.

Oh, hell, and in that minute, Bones would have stripped them both to bare skin with no prompting. That must have been why his hands were in fists at his side, keeping himself from moving and ruining the spun-sugar-fragile moment. “I’ll remember that,” he said. 

Spock nodded, hesitated just there, and then straightened up to full height. “I should dress for the day.” It sounded like the very last thing he wished to do, and yet he stepped to the side and excused himself to the bathroom.

Bones was left standing there looking at the rumpled bed, thinking out loud, saying, “ _fuck_.”

\--

They met up again in the lobby, Bones feeling stupid about his hasty retreat and Spock carrying his single bag looking suspicious (but amused). The lady who checked them out of the hotel wished them a good day with a wink. 

“While I admit that I am not entirely familiar with the many forms of human courtship, I cannot imagine that your present strategy has been properly optimized for positive results,” was Spock standing out on the sidewalk with him. 

The whole ocean was out there before them, dragging the sand to-and-fro, and the birds over their heads spinning circles in the sky. Bones was squinting into the sunlight with his perfectly parted hair, feeling like a giant fool and trying not to let it bubble up to the surface of his skin. “I don’t have a strategy,” he said.

Spock’s eyebrow seemed to indicate that he was aware of that.

“Do you have a strategy?” Bones asked.

Spock’s eyes narrowed just a fraction of a second before his whole face relaxed. His hand was curled around the strap of his bag in a gesture of uncertainty before he said, “I did not anticipate facing so many unexpected obstacles. In hindsight, your contradictory actions and statements should not have been a surprise.” 

“I don’t know if I should be insulted,” Bones said. He looked down the boardwalk and then back at Spock. He meant to say ‘so I’ll just assume I should be’ but Spock had that look again, the one where his focus went all fuzzy but intense, like he couldn’t quite concentrate on what was being said when there was all of Bones’ (unimpressive) body to stare at. Maybe it was that stare or the way the light slid into his brown-brown eyes, or it was he odd green blush under his pink lips (talk about contradictions) but Bones tipped his head and leaned up to kiss him. It was a grade-school kiss, a press of dry lips with unsure intentions. 

It must have taken Spock by surprise because he startled, almost pulled away and then didn’t. His hand curved around Bones’ jaw just when he was thinking it was all the stupidest thing he’d ever done. That hand was warm and smooth and holding him right-in-place, so he stayed and he let Spock kiss him. 

It was easy like that, out in the glorious sunshine of the glorious coast. The distant roar of the ocean was dragging all his worries out with the tide. 

For that second, right there, he wasn’t the survivor of a disaster, he wasn’t a divorced man with a bitter heart, he wasn’t half of a fucking-friendship. No, he was just Leonard McCoy, a part time idiot, not yet bruised by experience. Spock kissed him exactly like that, with such-sweet-delicacy. 

“This proves my hypothesis,” Spock whispered to him when Bones pulled away. “Your actions do not mirror your words.” 

“You say the sweetest things, Spock.” Then Bones motioned him down the boardwalk to the place that rented out vehicles to idiots like him that were taken in by romantic whims. “Let’s go find something to eat.”

Spock looked, if only for a moment, as if he wanted to strangle Bones but he gave with a nod, and followed him to the car rental office.

\--

As it turned out, they ended up sitting on their asses on a little hill, watching the sun pass lazily through the sky. Bones was leaning back on his elbows, just enjoying the smell of the grass and the puffy, familiar whiteness of the cloud hanging over their heads. 

Spock was sitting straight up, legs crossed in front of him as he tipped his head and tried to find something useful in the activity. Whatever he thought of it, the quiet seemed to do him good. It relaxed the tension that had kept his jaw clenched and his shoulders taut. “I miss my home,” he said quietly. “I meditate and I think of it, but it seems that no matter how calmly I concentrate, I cannot fully recreate the reality of it.” 

“Is new Vulcan very different?” Bones asked.

“I have researched the scientific data that survived the destruction of my home planet. I have strived to recreate the conditions when I can—the precise temperature, the humidity. I purchased an artifact that a man assured me was from Vulcan. It is only a rock. I conducted several studies on it and it appears to be genuine but it does not feel familiar to me.”

Bones sat up and looked at Spock’s upturned face. “I’m no expert,” he started.

Spock looked at him with a disdainful eyebrow. “You are a fully trained psychiatrist.”

“I took three classes, I’m no expert,” Bones countered. He paused for Spock to protest and when he did not, he continued, “you’re never going to find what you’re looking for by buying rocks. You’re looking for a feeling, Spock.” 

“I did love Nyota,” Spock said, as if they were even talking about her.

Bones nodded. “She loves you.”

“I find you especially annoying.” 

And he laughed at that, wrapped his arm around Spock’s shoulders and pulled him down into the grass. He ignored the man’s protests about grass and pollen and bugs. He held him there while he wiggled around so his head was pillowed on Spock’s chest. Their hands found one another in the ruckus, and Spock’s fingers were sliding between his and hanging-on-tight. 

“This is illogical,” Spock stated (the way Jim said, ‘this is stupid’). But he did not fight to sit back up.

Bones was busy looking at their hands and not at the sky, his thumb was lazily running back and forth across the back of Spock’s. There was sweat between Bone’s fingers but Spock’s were dry and _hot_. “Is it true about Vulcan hands?” he asked. He looked over at Spock’s face, “about kissing with your fingers?”

Spock put his free arm behind his head so he could look at him with greater ease. His fingers spread and then gripped around his again. “Our fingertips are significantly more sensitive than humans but not in the way that humans have sensationalized for their own carnal enjoyment.” Every word was dry but in counterpoint to way Spock’s thumb ran across the back of his hand with _slow_ , purposeful intent. 

Bones hummed at that. 

“Are you disappointed?” Spock’s voice was deep in his chest, rumbling under Bones’ head. He turned his face so he was laying on his side and pushed back against Spock’s palm just to see if he’d fight or give. “I do not understand,” Spock said but he pushed back against Bones’ hand. They wrestled (just a minute), easily going from pushing at one another’s hands to grappling in the grass. Spock was lean-and-tight and _strong_ , no matter how much Bones wriggled or squirmed, Spock overpowered him with ease.

So he was on his back, in the sunshine, with Spock pinning both his hands to the ground. There was the faintest green blush on his face and it was especially attractive paired with the leanness of his body over Bones’. He never thought he was much into men that could hold him down but the rest of his body was singing with appreciation nonetheless. He leaned up and kissed Spock. 

It was perfect, out in the sun, with Spock relaxing against him like an unwinding spring. They kissed like strangers, working out where to put their hands and their tongues. Spock’s hand slid under his shirt and Bones bent his knee to make space between his thighs. They were lazy laying all over one another. Spock’s hair was hot as fire under the sun, but thick and coarse between his fingers. 

“I do not understand your intentions,” Spock said with his lips worried green-under-pink. His hips had shifted so he wasn’t pushing against Bones’ body quite so obviously anymore. It was cute, that way he was trying not to be too obvious about getting hard and Bones smiled at him with both of his legs gripped tight on Spock’s bony hips. He rolled them over.

“Tell me why you think we’re sexually compatible,” he said when he was sitting back on his bent knees, looking at how Spock’s flush went down his neck. His shirt was tugged up around his waist, showing the dark trail of hair that ran down his skinny belly. Bones was thinking _filthy_ things as his hands wormed their way under the skin-tight shirt Spock was wearing. His palms were sliding across his hot-hot-skin and the hair that grew across his chest. 

“I had not thought about it,” was a blatant lie.

“You said you weren’t compatible with Jim.”

“Jim’s sexual history suggests that he places significant value on being dominant.” Spock’s hands were running up-and-down his thighs while he spoke, and his lips quirked at a thought when he said, “Jim’s personality suggests the same.”

“So, you want to fuck him and you don’t think he’d let you.” Since it was hot-as-hell and he was sweating anyway, he pulled his shirt off and dropped it to the side. Spock’s flush went a little deeper and his fingers tightened around the meat of his thighs. Bones was smiling at him, enjoying the flustered silence, “you think I’m going to let you fuck me?”

“I am less concerned with the matter of penetration,” was what Spock said, but not what his hands seemed to be trying to convey as they slid up toward his ass. “I simply prefer balance and harmony.” That must have been what he named either side of Bones’ ass because his hands were gripping there even while he tried to articulate his thoughts. 

“A simple yes would have taken less time,” Bones said. There was a breeze across his bare skin, and the delightful tingle of the sunshine baking his back when he leaned down to kiss Spock again. He had no sense of shame when it came to sex—saw no reason to be bashful at all once all parties involved had agreed to the proceedings. That must have been why he was inviting himself to pulling Spock’s shirt off over his head. It must have been why he held Spock there, sitting up so Bones could loop an arm around his back and shift his hips. It was easy-as-ever to rock his ass back against Spock, to watch his eyelids flutter and feel how his hands grasped uselessly at Bones’ back.

“I am uncertain what outcome you are hoping for,” Spock whispered with his eyes closed. 

“Orgasms are good.”

“You misunderstand my meaning,” Spock’s arms gripped around his body and they were falling over again, Bones on his back with his legs spread open and Spock kissing him with all that barely-restrained frustration he’d been downplaying from the first minute. There was something raw-and-wonderful in the way Spock kissed him. (Something very much like Jim’s sleep-rough voice, so far removed, saying ‘I believe the headlines’.) They were sliding against one another, hardly a breath of space between them.

God, it was good like that, stupid-and-free and so terribly-far-away from everything.

Spock kissed him like they were already fucking, one of his hands pushing Bones’ leg open so he could grind against him with none of the shame that had made him hesitate the first time they’d found themselves here. And Bones’ skin was starved for touch, that must have been why he was pulling open Spock’s pants and pushing them off his skinny-skinny hips. That must have been why he was arching up under him, with his fingernails digging fat-green-welts on Spock’s back.

“Leonard,” was Spock’s breathy objection. “This is not an ideal location for—” There was more that he’d intended to say (surely) but Bones’ fist closed around his dick and anything else he’d meant to say got lost in a strangle of sounds. Spock’s hair was a disaster, his whole face was precious-and-flushed as he stared down between them, working on getting Bones’ pants open and pushed down. 

They were idiots, like horny teenagers, kissing out in the grass like that. Pushing and rutting against one another until their fists were sticky.

\--

After, with good sense restored, Bones was sitting on his ass with his arms resting on his bent knees. Spock was shaking the grass out of his discarded shirt while the flush faded off his shoulders. 

“Leonard,” he said, in that exact way he said it back on that planet. When he thought they were going to die and he wanted it to be known how he really felt.

“You’re not wrong about Jim,” Bones said. He turned his head to look at Spock, squinting at the sunlight dropping low-and-fat in the sky. “He can’t stand not having control.”

“I did not mean to imply anything about your preferences.” Even those words were searching for whatever sore spot Spock thought he’d pushed and Bones considered letting him stew about it. It was a good idea, the kind of thing that would have driven the Vulcan insane. He could just imagine the diagrams and the phone calls involved in trying to work out what damage he’d done to Bones’ pride and how best to apologize it. (He could imagine Jim trying not to laugh on the other end of another phone call, making mountains out of mole hills.) 

“Spock,” he said before anything else could be said, “I prefer harmony and balance.”

That confounded Spock even more.

“You want to fuck Jim,” Bones said. “It doesn’t matter what you say, it doesn’t matter what he says—it’s true.”

“I am attracted to him; I do not believe it is worthwhile to pursue it.”

Bones smiled at that and rubbed his hand through his hair. Grass and weeds and pollen fell out of the mess of it. “I don’t want to be someone you settle for. I’ve been that before. I don’t want to be something convenient.” Oh, but more importantly, “I don’t want to be a stop-over to get to Jim. It wouldn’t even be the first time I was that either.”

“I have not settled.” Spock stopped fussing with his shirt, concentrated entirely on him, “I have pursued you. If my intention was to choose Jim, it would have been more expedient and more logical to remain on Yorktown. He is emotionally and physically vulnerable without you to protect him.”

“We fight constantly, Spock. There’s no harmony between us.”

“I have found our many exchanges arousing on many levels. I have found that I prefer your company over others whose passions are not quite so evident. While I cannot deny that you are, at times, intentionally antagonistic, I find that more frequently you are simply arguing what you believe is correct. I respect this about you. It is not evidence of a lack of harmony.”

That was a lot to digest. Bones nodded. “But you do want to fuck me, and you do think I’ll let you.”

Spock’s entire body considered him an idiot, caught up on stupid ideas. “Yes,” he said without intonation. 

“Well,” he said, “you’re not wrong.” He laughed in that exact moment after, when Spock’s face puckered up in uncontainable anger. It wouldn’t have been noticeable to anyone that hadn’t spent these past years starting and stoking fights with the man. But Bones was a connoisseur at picking fights with Spock. 

“Leonard,” Spock said, “you simply defy logic.”

“Thank you, Spock.”

Spock didn’t roll his eyes but if he was human, he might have. “I would like to find an available room for rent; if you are finished here.” He was already on his feet, dusting the grass and dirt off his clothes with quick, sharp slaps and failing (almost entirely) at getting any cleaner.

\--

“If there’s a universe where Jim has brown eyes, is there a universe where you have blonde hair?” Bones was picking apart the fried chicken they’d gotten at a corner store while Spock was disdainfully regarding the salad he’d chosen. (What it lacked was creativity and variety, but not flavor because it was fresh-picked greens and even Bones would have eaten it.) 

“Yes,” was not the answer Bones was hoping for. Spock gave up trying to pretend to like the salad and pushed it to the side of the little round table they were sharing. He regarded the greasy tips of Bones’ fingers with no fondness (or judgment). “There must also be one where you are blond.”

“I don’t think I’d be very attractive blond,” he mumbled around the mostly-chewed chicken he was trying to swallow. He offered Spock the coleslaw that had come with the chicken and was treated to another long stare of disbelief. “Try it.”

Spock ate a nibble off the tip of his fork like a child. (And never once looked ashamed of himself for it.) “I believe you would be attractive regardless of the color of your hair.”

“Yeah?” He wiped his fingers on the napkin folded up the box the meal had come in to push it out of the way. “What makes me so attractive that you don’t care about how my hair looks or what color it is?”

“Physically?”

“Yes.”

Spock was still a moment, looking him over with calculated purpose. It was so scientific that it might have been an insult; and there was Bones with a cup of tea in one hand, thinking about how convenient it was that the bed was so nearby. He was thinking about Spock’s shoulders, and his ears and about how dark his eyes were when the lights were dim. He was thinking about the feeling of his slick, coarse hair ruffling up between Bones’ fingertips. 

It was hard to imagine what it would look like blond, or how it would change his face—but it wouldn’t change his body. It wouldn’t change the length of his torso or his posture or his legs. It wouldn’t change how precisely he moved.

“I am especially attracted to your mouth. I find it fascinating that it can easily convey your every thought without ever effectively communicating your meaning through words.” Spock’s stare lingered on his mouth and Bones smiled all sly-and-slow. “I more attracted to your non-physical attributes.”

“I’ve never been accused of having much in the way of non-physical attributes before.” He ran his tongue across his lips, chasing away the last taste of the sweet-southern-style-tea before he leaned back into his seat. “Chapel and I figured my wife probably married me because my genetics were good enough to pass along.”

“Your daughter is also quite passionate, and intelligent. Your ex-wife was not entirely incorrect in choosing you for genetic purposes.” 

“Not sure I can get credit for Joanna turning out like she did, other than her eyes and her nose but, thank you Spock. That’s nice of you to say.” The conversation was sliding sideways. Bones was out of practice at dating anyone (and he’d only ever done it the once) and Spock was ruffling up with jealousy over someone that didn’t matter anymore. “I like your hands,” he said instead of arguing the finer points of genetics and nature-vs-nurture with Spock. The man was one-third the way to thanking him before Bones interrupted him again, “and your ass. And now that I’ve had the occasion to get my hands on it, I’ve been thinking very highly of your penis as well.”

“Leonard if you do not intend for us to have sex, I would prefer we change the subject.”

“No, I think we should have sex,” Bones said. “We’ve got a bed.”

Spock went so far as to completely turn his head to look at the bed (as if he didn’t see it or notice it before) and then look back at him. “Yes. We do have a bed.” Then he picked the table up and set it to the side without throwing a single thing off it. His hands folded around the edges of the chair and pulled it forward. 

“See,” was the breathiest Bones’ voice had been since he was running for his life, “that’s just not playing fair.” But it didn’t matter that much to him when he could kiss Spock rather than argue with him. 

\--

There was a message in his inbox when he bothered to find a screen to open it. Bones was half-sleep (in the best possible way) when he clicked on it, or he would have recognized all the earmarks of a bad idea:

1\. From Chapel  
2\. Had no subject line  
3\. Arrived shortly after he called Jim

She’d sent him the front-page-news of the daily gossip rag. It read: Vulture on Vacation: how soon is too soon? But just beneath it was a full-color photograph (pristine in quality) of him and Spock sitting on the beach. He was shirtless and leaning in, whispering something to Spock who was looking at him with enough damning intensity that nobody needed to bother to read the article beneath it. 

He read it, though. Every line was frothing with sarcasm; every single paragraph chock full of comparing him to a carrion eater. There he was, naked to the skin with a sheet around his shoulders, reading about how he had gone off and successfully made supper of another failed relationship. 

Beneath the front page, there was Chapel’s message saying: ‘I thought you’d want to know before you came back.’

It was-and-was _not_ the wrong assumption. 

\--

“What exactly are we doing,” came just after Spock started kissing his neck. It was saddled neatly between the way Bones had invited him back to bed to wake up his brand-new-lover and Spock tipping his head to look at him with some concern caught between his eyebrows. 

Oh, but every inch of Spock was _warm_ soaking through the blankets and the clothes that he slept in, providing a perfect antidote to the chilliness caught in Bones’ chest. It was deeper than the heat of his skin, more than the span of his palms slipping up Bones’ naked back, or the rich, dark brown of his eyes. 

“As I am not the one that initiated this encounter, I do not feel that I am best equipped to make that determination,” Spock whispered. It was hot-and-close, a puff of damp heat against Bones’ mouth. 

Wasn’t it stupid to be asking stupid questions with his fingers ruffling up the short hair at the nape of Spock’s neck. Stupid to be worrying over being called a buzzard and gobbling up men caught up in the wake of tragedy. (But what had Spock said to him the day before, he was a fully trained psychiatrist and they were two stupid men trying to make it through the day.) “What do you want out of this,” Bones asked. 

It wasn’t fair, and he was man enough to admit it. He’d accosted Spock with dirty promises and bare skin. He’d touched him like they were revving up to play a sequel to the night before. Every inch of him was hungry to be touched and even while he questioned the man’s intentions, his body was leaning in against him. 

“I do not understand your inquiry, Leonard.” Spock’s hands slid down again, rested on his hips as he leaned his head back to look at him more fully. It made it easy to coil his fingers in the mess of his tangled hair. 

“The last person I dated, I married,” Bones said. “What do you want out of me?”

Spock’s fingertips dug into the flesh of his lower back. He tugged his hips forward and lifted him up and rolled them so Bones was spread out under him. The blanket that had been laying easily between them was suddenly strangling half his body. Spock’s hands dented the bed on either side of his chest as he waited (patiently) for Bones to get free of the blankets, and while he waited he just looked at him, completely poised and in control. Spock’s face was placid-and-neutral with his hair pulled up in a failed mohawk. 

“Still thinking about it?” Bones asked when he was laying still again.

“I am interested in exploring a romantic and sexual relationship with you,” Spock stated. It was exactly the same as he’d said the day before (or the one before that). “As I have already said as much, I do not understand your inquiry.”

“So, tell me what that means, what’s a romantic relationship? What do you want this to be? Are we going to get married one day? Are we going to retire together, live in a cabin in the woods—are you going to take vacations with me to see my daughter and my sister? Are we going on dates during shore leave? Do I have to sit and watch you play chess with Jim for hours? Is this going to be us arguing about whether we should get a dog or have a baby.”

“We are biologically—”

“I’m a doctor,” Bones said before Spock could worry over the details. “You’re looking for something, Spock. I don’t have what you’re looking for, and we aren’t going to do any better at making something out of this than you had of making it work with Uhura if you think I’ve got the answer.”

Spock sat back on his bent knees and rested his hands against his own thighs. He didn’t look at Bones (bare naked as he was) but to the side. His eyebrows knitted in concentration as he worked it out (like numbers, and equations, unravelling in the space behind his eyeballs). When he came back from those thoughts, he said, “I enjoy sharing social and recreational activities with you. I would expect ‘dates’, perhaps more frequently than our infrequent shore leave allows. I do not feel strongly about marriage at this point; if that is a requirement that must be met for your happiness I am willing to discuss it.”

“Well, I don’t care but I bet Devon and Joanna’s already picked out the wedding cake.”

“I do not understand these—” and a pause there betrayed his discomfort or distaste at having to say it, “ _feelings_ that persist despite my attempts to discard them.” That must have been terrible for him, it looked like a bitter taste caught in his teeth as he said it. “I cannot divorce my attraction toward you from these emotions, in a way, I imagine, is very similar to how you cannot separate your own feelings from your attraction to me.”

“That’s different, all we humans do is feel. Aren’t you,” and he shoved himself so he was sitting upright with his stupid legs spread open around Spock’s body. “the one that’s spent the past six years telling me that? Humans are illogical, humans make stupid choices based on feelings? Humans should be extinct?”

“I did not say—”

“I can’t divorce my feelings from my attraction to you,” Bones said. “I can’t make this choice without my feelings; I _don’t_ make choices without feelings.”

Spock did not sigh but a lesser man might have. “You are the most _human_ man that I have ever met, Leonard. While this has not always been meant in a complimentary way, I feel that, at this point, you are the most compatible mate.”

“Why?”

“We each have the ability to assist the other to find the answers that the other is searching for.” Spock shifted so he was sitting more comfortably, with his legs crossed in front of him.

Bones matched him so their knees were bumping together. He wasn’t at ease but fidgeting with the blanket to the side, staring at Spock like waiting for him to start laughing the whole thing off. “You can tell me why those people had to die?”

“No,” Spock said. But before Bones could point out the flaw in his logic, Spock said, “you can tell me why I cannot go and see my Father, why I cannot embrace my species or the new planet they have found. You can tell me why I can feel fury for Ambassador Spock allowing Nero to enter our timeline, and why I can feel sorrow for his passing.”

“Are you going to grab my ass in public?” Bones asked.

“That is very unlikely.” Spock paused, “unless it is important to you that I do.” (That was all Jim, that smile that was sneaking in at the edges of Spock’s lips. That dirty sense of sly humor they’d been passing back and forth across the chess board for years.) “Will you tell your family?”

“I think they know,” Bones said. 

They were quiet then, sitting there on the bed, just digesting all the things they’d said. The whole day was waiting for them, just beyond the closed hotel door, and Spock looked out toward the sunlight beyond the curtains of their single window, and back at Bones. “I confess that I expected a different outcome when you kissed me.” 

Bones leaned back on his elbows again, tipped his head to the side to look at how Spock’s cheeks were blushing up green again, and said, “did you, Spock? What outcome were you expecting?”

Spock was a genius and a Vulcan, possessed of pure logic, and that must have been why he pulled his shirt off and threw it off the bed before he tipped forward and spread his body out over Bones’. “I believe it would be easiest to show you, Leonard.” Then he kissed him again, and there was no quiver of uncertain or half-thought thing in the way he touched him. 

No, Spock kissed him like he was settling in for the long run, and Bones kissed him back slow-as-honey because it had been years since he’d felt anything like it. 

\--

“I would prefer,” Spock said when they were snoozing in the aftermath. He was still sweat-glued to Bones’ side but he’d moved his hands away to rest against his own chest. “That we were monogamous.” 

“I’m that good in bed, huh?” Bones mumbled. He stretched the lethargy out of his muscles and rolled onto his side. There were still fading marks he’d left on Spock’s neck. (Since he’d gone off and gotten confused about how old he was.) “You aren’t very old, are you?” he asked. “I know how old you are,” cut off Spock before he could answer that he was only three years younger than him, “I mean, Vulcans live much longer than humans. You’re very young for a Vulcan.”

“That is one way to interpret the data.” But, “I would prefer that we were monogamous.”

“I would prefer that as well.”

Spock nodded and looked at the marks he’d left on Bones with a vague smile. They’d have to have a conversation about that, maybe tomorrow or the day after. There was no need to go off giving the gossip rag a whole new feature (find the hickeys on the doctor!) or Jim any ammunition to crack jokes. Today, though, he said, “any strange Vulcan mating rituals or sexual habits I need to know about?”

“Once I reach full maturity, I will begin to experience Pon Farr once every seven years. It is the biological urge to mate that can be satiated only by mating or fighting to the death.” Spock said all of it like it was nothing-at-all of note. Simply nothing to worry over. He even ran his thumb across a blushing-pink hickey he’d left well above Bones’ collar. Just for a second, he seemed very proud about it. 

“That is _strange_ , Spock.”

“A significant portion of sexually reproducing creatures experience something similar. One could therefore make the argument that humans experiencing it constantly is _stranger_.”

Bones laughed, “I didn’t hear you complaining.” He flopped back onto his back and used his toes to pull the blankets up.

“I am part human.” Spock helped him settle the blankets over them and once they were comfortably covered, his fingers wandered across the blanket to find Bones’ hand. They laid there, sharing body heat and blankets, Bones with his eyes closed and Spock with perfectly even breathing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> actual things to happen in the next chapter.


End file.
